Securing cheap flights is all a matter of timing

The Man Who Pays His Way: Work, education and family commitments compress travel opportunities into annoyingly slim portions

Rich pickings: the airlines' distressed inventory can be your joyful experience, in destinations such as Marseille (Simon Calder)

Some travellers have little choice about their destinations. I was reminded of that while enjoying the current revival of Noises Off. Michael Frayn’s inverted farce features a troupe of repertory actors whose dramatic adventures extend little further than Weston-super-Mare, Ashton-under-Lyne and Stockton-on-Tees.

Those of us in the audience, meanwhile, enjoy a wider range of destinations than ever, including some more exotic than that trio of towns.

What most prospective holidaymakers have little choice about, though, is timing.

Work, education and family commitments tend to compress opportunities to escape into annoyingly slim slices of the year: Christmas and New Year, Easter, late July and August.

For the travel industry, that implies some fabulously rich pickings. As you will have spotted, airlines cash in on these narrow time horizons. My benchmark for measuring the money they are making: a flight from Gatwick to Geneva and back in the third week of February, the usual half term in southeast England.

On this route outbound on 15 February, back a week later, a couple of easyJet departures are sold out completely. There is still room on adjacent departures, but fares are soaring to £1,332 return – without luggage, seat assignment or even an inflight cup of tea.

You may be incensed by that figure, and regard it as abject profiteering from a captive market. I disagree. No one is forced to pay a sum corresponding to £5 for every minute spent in the air. The airline is simply offering a product at a particular price. It is entirely up to you (and your credit-card limit) whether or not to buy.

If my argument persuades you, can I push my luck and ask you to feel a smidgeon of sympathy for the airlines? In a business when the sun doesn’t shine for much of the year, making hay is tricky.

Right now the travel industry is as gloomy as the skies. The usual late November/early December slump has been compounded by the general election, which has depressed demand (as well as many voters). Accordingly there is a surge in “distressed inventory”. Nothing is more perishable than an empty seat on an aircraft.

Can you possibly travel next week, even if for just a couple of days? You would ease the pain of the airlines, and more to the point cheer yourself up.

The airline with the very lowest price, predictably, is Ryanair. Its “yield passive, load factor active” strategy means fares are cut to whatever level is required to fill its planes.

If £20 return is your limit, Europe’s biggest budget airline will fly from Stansted to Toulouse or Liverpool to Dublin.

From Manchester to Marseille, a long weekend (out on Saturday, back on Tuesday) booked at 48 hours notice to the Mediterranean and back is just £40.

People saddled with jobs may reasonably point out they have no more than a short weekend. Look no further than British Airways, which is offloading some distressed December inventory through its excellent city-breaks programme.

BA has plenty of options at £99 for a return flight from one of the London airports (usually Gatwick) and two nights in a decent hotel, including breakfast.

That sub-£100 price applies to the Tuscan spa town of Montecatini Termi on five different dates from 7 to 17 December, and to the lovely Lido di Jesolo opposite Venice on 10 days between 1 and 15 December.

If you prefer to meet early summer in the southern hemisphere, on pretty much any day you care to name in the next couple of weeks, Cathay Pacific will get you from Manchester to Melbourne for under £700 – yes, travel to the other side of the world for half the cost of a half-term ski flight to Geneva.

This is the best of times to be a traveller. But, like the best farces, it is all a matter of timing.