airfare dilemma, what would you do?

[kt_mom]

We live in a small town that has an airport but only one airline comes here, US Air. The last couple trips we have flown Airtran out of Richmond and paid less than $400 round trip for the 3 of us. We like the early morning flight so we drive the 2 hours to Richmond on Saturday evening and spend the night at one of the airport hotels with parking and take the shuttle in the morning to the airport. But the airtran flights right now, round trip would be $237+ taxes/fees.

I was looking today at flights out of our town and decided to check the last flight out on Saturday night instead of sunday morning. Well, its much cheaper. It was $100 vs $208. Now the return flights the next Sunday are still a little high unless we take a really early morning flight at like 7am for $154. The next cheapest is the 8:45 flight that's $194. The time we like (11:53am) is $228.

So I decided I would book just the departure flight right now because $100 is a great price out of our town but when I went to book the one way flight the price was $134. The one ways coming back don't seem to change but going down it does. Its still a pretty good price but I reall liked that $100 better.

If it was airtran then I would definitely just book the round trip tickets to get the $100 on the departure flight and then if the return flight went down call and get my credit. But I don't think US Air works that way so I'm stuck with whatever I choose. Which at this point is paying quite a bit more for a good flight time home or having to be at the ME stop at 4:00am or 5:45am. I'm almost positive my DH won't do the 7am flight so it would most likely be the 8:45 flight.

So what would you do? Pay the extra $34/person now to get the departure flight and wait and see what happens with the return flights, or save that and book the round trip flight and just suck it up and do the early flight home?

 

[NotUrsula]

Generally, Sundays are going to be your most expensive flight dates in and out of resort destinations, while Saturday, along with Tu and Wed, are usually the cheapest days to fly. (There are exceptions, especially near holidays and/or special events, but that's the general rule of thumb.)

Is there any reason why you cannot schedule your trip Saturday to Saturday?

FWIW, I would never book one leg of a trip at a time if I was dealing with a choice of multiple possible "home" airports -- unless you have a reliable and cost-effective way of handling ground transportation that doesn't require parking a vehicle and stranding it.

 

[kt_mom]

Generally, Sundays are going to be your most expensive flight dates in and out of resort destinations, while Saturday, along with Tu and Wed, are usually the cheapest days to fly. (There are exceptions, especially near holidays and/or special events, but that's the general rule of thumb.)

Is there any reason why you cannot schedule your trip Saturday to Saturday?

FWIW, I would never book one leg of a trip at a time if I was dealing with a choice of multiple possible "home" airports -- unless you have a reliable and cost-effective way of handling ground transportation that doesn't require parking a vehicle and stranding it.

DH can't get off two saturdays for vacation so we always go sunday to sunday. He can get off in time to catch that later in the day flight out of our home town so that's what we're going to do.

I ended up having to take DS to the Dr. yesterday afternoon and never got a chance to book anything. Which turned out to be a good thing. I checked this morning and I was able to book the one way flights out of our local airport for $109 each. They came down $25 since yesterday. The round trip had gone up to $109 for the departure so I just booked the one way for now. The return flights had come down some too but I'm still not sure if its worth the savings to be at the ME stop at 4am to get a 7am flight. Well actually I guess 3:45am to be safe. The 7am flight is $117, the 8:45 flight is $154 and the next later flight is around $170 I think.

We could fly into another airport because DH could use a DX driver from his work to move our car from one airport to the other if need be for minimal cost to us. But I think its going to work out to fly back into our home too. I just have to decide what's more important, the flight time or the savings....