I have to travel in about two weeks, if the dates don’t shift. I can wait and see if the dates will shift or not, but the airfare prices continue the climb the longer I wait. Or, I could book now with a $200 penalty to reschedule. So, what would the SD expert travelers say? Which is the lesser of two evils? 
Note that on a completely unused ticket, it is usually $200 plus the fare difference (if any). So for example, let’s say you book a $1000 ticket now and later change your mind. At the time you change your mind, the cheapest available ticket is $1500, you’ll have to pay $700.
The rules for partially used tickets (for example, the return half of a round trip) are different.
I don’t know how certain you are or what the price/availability trends are in the market where you will be going. Many discount fares require 14 day advance purchase. But I recently priced travel between two majors cities and found much to my surprise that there were bargain fares with no advance purchase. It’s crazy and no two city pairs are alike.
I hate going to all the trouble and expense of rescheduling and never book a flight until I am absolutely sure of the dates.
Look for an app called Hopper, (not from the App Store), instead of aggregating fares it predicts rises and falls in airfares. Might be worth checking out! I always check it before I buy!
But I’m with Siam Sam, I don’t book till I’m sure on the date.
Count me in the never-book-until-sure-of-dates camp.
Yep, we never book until we’re absolutely sure.
If you’re not locked into a particular airline, shop around. Different airlines offer different refund policies and some are pretty lenient. I believe Southwest is one of the best ones - at the very least they’ll give you a full credit voucher for your ticket.
Without knowing where you are traveling, it’s a difficult recommendation to make.
If fares are rising and you really think there’s a chance your travel dates will change, check to see if a fare that allows you to change travel dates is terribly much more than the fare you are looking at.
For example: I checked Dallas to Dulles on AA a second ago. They have the restricted fare for $417 and an unrestricted fare for just $577 (a $160 diff). The restricted fare has a change fee of $200 + fare difference The unrestricted fare includes no change fee ($200 value), free same day changes and stand-by ($150), a free checked bag ($50), two free alcoholic drinks ($14), and priority boarding ($30). So you get a few more perks buying the more expensive ticket and if you change flights, you’ve more than covered the cost difference of the ticket. If not, it’s just a $100 bet when other perks are added in.
The other thing to worry about is the passenger count and seats available. Airlines have been pretty consistently running with 80% and higher passenger loads. If you are going someplace with several flights per day, you’ll be fine. If it’s someplace that has few seats available each day, you could find yourself shut out as the flights fill up. That’s happened to me before. Ended up having to fly to an airport a couple hours away and driving rather than going direct. Ate up all the savings that way.
If you happen to be going somewhere that Southwest flies to, they don’t charge change fees. Of course, if your new ticket is more expensive (which it will be, since prices generally rise closer to departure date) you do have to pay the difference. But at least you’re not adding change fees to that.
I second this. Southwest is often pretty competitively priced too. Just the other day we decided to move our reservation a day forward. Unlike when we booked, the prices were lower and not only is there no change fee the difference in fee is credited to us for future travel. In fact, I noticed another reservation had a cheaper price so I just changed it (to exactly the same flight) to get the credit.
Southwest is significantly more consumer friendly than the average airline. I’m not sure I understand the economics behind the discrepancy.
Every airline has a different policy on re-booked ticket, and even that can vary according to fare class. So you need to know what those policies are before making your booking plans, if you are in doubt.
My credit card company includes interrupted travel insurance. There is always the fallback of finding a friendly doctor to advise me not to travel.
In fact, we often get the lowest fares that mean no rebooking allowed. For example, I’ve already paid for our flight to Cambodia next month, and if for any reason whatsoever we can’t go, we’re just out the cash. We’d just have to buy new tickets for new dates. As it is, the fare is only 6000 baht (US$170) round trip each, much lower than if we’d opted for fares that allowed rebooking.