Not sure if this belongs here or in IMHO, but here goes.
I have a family trip coming up in July 2012. The dates are fixed but some of my travel options are flexible. What I would like to do, within boundaries, is find the cheapest airfare.
I think the General Questions part of this is is if I can find the lowest airfare in the previous 12 months between my cities of travel. That at least would give me some idea of when to look for low airfares and just how low they might go.
The more IMHO opinion of this is when do I decide the airfare is about the lowest I’m going to find. I’ve already checked the airfares, so I know what they are today (roughly $500), but suppose they drop to $400 tomorrow. Is that a good price? Do I wait another 6 months to see if they drop below that since I have so much time before I travel?
This reminds me of the old puzzle of trying to find the princess with the largest dowry. You let x number go and then pick the highest after that. I feel like I’m in some sort of casino game.
Kayak (and probably other sites) show you a fever chart of recent pricing. Airfarewatchdog.com will email you when a fare drops significantly, or below a certain point.
But why the deep mysteriousness in these discussions? Don’t you suppose it would be helpful for us to know if your trip is domestic, trans-Atlantic, or to Southeast Asia?
For domestic fares, there’s not much point in concerning yourself until about six weeks before departure. If someone has a deep sale before then, great. You’ll know from the fever chart that it’s a good deal.
I fly a lot for leisure purposes (making my dates and flight times are typically flexible) and I am also a HUGE, world-class cheapskate, meaning that if I can save even just $100 bucks or so, I will gladly take a layover or a wierdo connecting flight thru Spokane, Santa Fe or somewhere else equally out of the way, and I can attest that 90% (or more) of the time, buying fights 3, 4 or even 6 months (or more) in advance is going to end up costing you MORE, not less…
There are exceptions to this general rule, but I find that by pulling the trigger too early you are almost always spending more than you need to.
Good Luck,
Thanks for the advice. I will keep an eye on the airfares and not really get serious about purchasing for another few months, at least. If you travel a lot I’m assuming my experiences with airfare has just been flukes, because I can think of at least 3 times where I purchased tickets 6 months in advance and that was the lowest the prices ever got. After that they just went up.
Bing travel: Microsoft Bing Travel uses a price predictor to estimate whether fare prices for the particular leg you are searching will go up down or stay steady. They say based upon audit of their predictions they are 75% accurate.