So I’m looking for decent transatlantic ticket prices. Flying Munich to either Bangor or Boston. What my father and I are finding is that the tickets on the routes we usually take (Munich-London-Boston, Munich-Philedelphia-Bangor) have jumped in price from around $1000 to 1000€. Pretty big step up. What the heck is going on? Can someone help me find a decent price?
Try http://www.kayak.com which searches all sites. You might also check the foreign airlines direct sites which you find from Kayak.
Check a variety of dates and departure times, and look at different airports to leave from and arrive to.
Prices for domestic US flights vary greatly depends on these factors, and sometimes flying into a less popular airport, such as Oakland compared to San Francisco, can save you big $$$. YMMV.
Airlines are one of the most unprofitable businesses in the world. If you can find cheap seats grab them.
It is the summer and peak travel season for the cross Atlantic.
Jeez, what you expect ?
Check http://matrix.itasoftware.com/. Ifind it very useful for my travel plans. I reckon it was recenly acquired by Google.
Nothing special. Prices vary within this range (and more) all the time. In real terms, prices have been trending downwards for many years, but the price you have to pay on any particular occasion could be higher or lower depending on demand.
An economy class ticket from Dublin to Osaka return with KLM or Air France typically costs about €800, and has cost roughly this same amount in nominal terms for over 15 years. But the price for a particular set of dates may well turn out to be over €1000.
Well given that this is more or less exactly the itinerary and dates I’ve had several times for the last few years (flying late july and returning late august), not a massive price jump… I’m really sort of wondering if it’s just way up this year, or what? Also, to those offering more indexers: thanks! I’m running the data on those too.
Tickets seem to be really high this year. I’ve been looking since February for tickets to Hawaii for a specific week in July, and they haven’t dropped below $700 yet. I was expecting something closer to $400.
Really? $400 in July? Where do you live? LA?
You can play around with Google Flights: https://www.google.com/flights/ but it doesn’t automatically generate fares from all discount airlines like Southwest Airlines and Norwegian.
Bangor (BGR) tends to be an expensive destination because there is not much real competition from non-legacy airlines.
You might consider flying into New York or some other East-coast city on one of the inexpensive international airlines and then taking a different, domestic, airline to Boston (BOS), Manchester New Hampshire (MHT) or Portland Maine (PWM). Using two different airlines admittedly makes connections a hassle. For example, www.norwegian.com flies from Munich to JFK, and JetBlue flies from JFK to Portland. The exact fares depend on the dates, of course. If you can find a good fare from Munich to Baltimore (BWI), Southwest usually has inexpensive flights from there to MHT and somewhat higher fares to PWM.
Seattle. There are $300 tickets pretty regularly during other times of the year.
Vary both:
- The date of arrival/departure - midweek is better than Fri/Sat. Some websites will allow you to do this easily.
- The day of the week that your search and possibly buy the tickets. They don’t release seats equally every day. IIRC Tuesday is good for this.
As said, vary airport. I don’t know Bangor, but smaller airports generally cost more.
Note that Southwest tickets can cost more and still cost the same if you check bags. Many airlines are e.g. $25 per bag each way, Southwest is free. Also Alaska Airlines charges, but it’s cheaper, and some flights have free beer & wine, so budget accordingly 
In other words, be aware that hidden fees can make the cheaper flight cost more.
Also, OAK is a more central location, and has a better airport and fewer delays than SFO.
I had to fly to South West Florida a few times. Many of those times, it was cheaper to fly to Ft. Lauderdale and drive 110 minutes than to fly to Ft. Myers and drive 20 minutes.
To answer the OP’s question in general, yes airfares are a lot higher now then they have been. It’s simple supply and demand: Supply is way down, because of all the recent airline mergers. There are many fewer seats available for sale than there used to be, so airlines can charge more for them. There have been quite a few news articles reporting this.