I am trying to plan a trip to Ireland, however, I’m a neophyte to booking flights. Does airfare get cheaper as one’s departure date gets closer? I want to go in July, so if I were to book it in June, would it be cheaper than if I booked it today? I could go in the middle of May as well. Would that be cheaper? I’m using side-step right now. Should I do that, or should I go through an agent? I hope I don’t sound too much like an idiot.
Don’t worry about not understanding how airfares works, logic does not necessarly apply.
First you have to understand the nature of the comodity that is being sold. Airlines seats are in limited supply (only so many on the plane) and when they spoil they spoil 100% in a flash. In other words once the door closes any empties are 100% worthless.
So this should mean that the closer to departure the cheaper the fare right? Well in two words, not necessarly. Ya see the airlines aren’t dumb and they know that business travelers often make their plans only a day or two in advance of the trip, so fares can go up the closer to departure. They understand that the business traveler has to be somewhere at a certain time, and that many business travelers don’t / can’t plan ahead. So they soak the business traveler.
I got an object lesson in this earlier this year. As a cost cutting measure, my company required me to get approval from 6 different people before going to a conference in Europe. When I submitted my approval form I made a reservation for $600 round trip from LA (an excellect fare BTW), lost that fare, because I could not buy the ticket until it was approved. Re-did the reservation at 850 lost that one also. Again at 1500 and again lost it. Finally the day before the trip, my approval came through my ticket cost $2200. Some cost savings huh?
Now the equalizer in this is priceline and other discounters that buy blocks of unsold tickets at bargin prices and resell a day or two before the flight. The problem here is that supply may be spotty.
Now here are some suggestions for getting a low fare. You did not say where you are leaving from, so I will assume SC. A long lead time will help on fares, but 8 months is overboard. Start checking about 2 months before. A May departure could well be much cheaper than June (not into summer yet) Play on the net check the sites for the Airlines you want to fly. Check several airports For instance if you are between two large airports one might be cheaper than the other. An example of this is Newark is cheaper to fly out of than Kennedy. Check several destination airports if you can. It may be cheaper to fly to London Heathrow and catch a shuttle flight, than to fly direct.
Keep checking fares, look for specials at the airlines sites. Some airlines will e-mail you with sales.
Anyway by the time you are a month or so out, you should have a pretty good idea of what seats go for. Call the airline reservation desk and ask about pre-purchase deadlines. The airline I fly on has a three week and a 1 week deadline. That means that if I buy 21 or more days in advance, I get one fare, if I buy less than 21 days but more than 7 days I pay more. Less than 7 days I pay full fare. Saturday night stay overs usually cut the price of the ticket (this make you a leisure traveler, not a business traveler, so they cut the price). Non refundable tickets cost less than refundable tickets. Warning, non refundable tickets are getting harder to exchange than they were in the past.
Of course if you are free to make you own schedule and you easy, then you can try priceline or Expedia, or Hotwire.
Anyway I would guess that with a little shopping you should be in the $600 dollar range without going to a discounter.
I hope this helps.
Hope this helps.
Well, thank you very much. That is a great help.
Another thing, what I was planning to do was to fly from either Charlotte or Atlanta (preferably Charlotte) to London. Should get a connecting flight to Ireland or should I take a ferry? I looking for cheap here, I’m a college student.
Rick gave very good information. Just a pointer on the price from different airports. The tax that is charged on a ticket is determined by the place of departure. A round trip ticket to Chicago is cheaper if you fly out of Tupelo, MS than it is if you fly out of Memphis, even though the first leg of the trip is Tupelo to Memphis. So, which has lower taxes, Charlotte or Atlanta? It might be worth your while to check flying out of Greensville/Spartanburg.
As a college student, I suggest you try the STA website (Student Travel… Something). They often have very good prices.
mischievous
As a college student I suggest you check out Ryanair for the London-Dublin flight. They fly regularly and are cheap, but they are cheap for a reason. It is the air-equivelant of hitch-hiking.
You will most likely get to your destination, the question is only really when. In other words, to not time your flight back to London anywhere near your flight from London, make sure there are a good 6 hours in between 
www.ryanair.com
Yes i must add to this
STA travel is the company mischievous is refereing to.
I use them and they are simply excelent. http://www.statravel.com/
I am not evena student and i get a better deal then i would anywhere else - saved me over a grand and gave me direct flights.
22 hours Aus to New York were Quantas wanted to cahrge me 3K and have me stay over night in Japan !
Also, flights from and to Commonwealth countries are much cheaper. Some friends of mine drove from the Seattle area up to Vancouver B.C. and flew from there to Australia–and saved over $600 per ticket.
And yes, that’s in American dollars, so no snippy jokes about Canadian currency.
I book with the airlines web site. One time I did that with United & they wanted $505 on the website. So I called them on the phone & they quoted me $595 for the same flight. I said ‘but on your website its $505.00’ & they said ‘so order from the website’.
For Hawaii try Suntrips, if they can’t fill a flight they discount it to $199 round trip a couple weeks beforehand.
Well, yeah. That’s one of the best things that have come out of the internet. It’s made the travel agent (and his commission) obsolete because they were just an office with a computer link to the airlines. Ordering online genuinely saves the airline (and you) a lot of money.
Yeah, don’t feel bad if you have a hard time figuring out a fare. I heard on NPR once that there are something like 10^32 possible fares and routes between more than two points. Finding the lowest fare has now become an intractable problem that requires a battery of supercomputers and about a thousand years to solve.