April Concerns.....

[browniemtb]

Well we booked our BWV for April vacation. This will be our first trip ever in April, generally we go in November for the F&W. With my oldest entering High School and the demands of her sports we decided to go in April. Now my DW is concerned about flight cost. So far Jet Blue put rates out there as well as a few others for crazy $$. For the seasoned April travelers what would the best time be to grab April flights? We also considered driving but 22 hours in a car with 4 kids, how would I even plan that????

 

[jennylyn_b]

Keep watching and waiting. We are going early May and are waiting until after Labor Day. Prices usually go down after summer.

 

[LisaS]

We usually go in early May but a few times we went in late April instead. You are correct that airline fares are crazy in April! About the only thing you can do to get a better fare is to fly on Tuesdays or Wednesdays instead of weekends.

The upside to an April stay is that the weather is fantastic at that time of year.

 

[tjkraz]

If it's anywhere in the proximity of spring break--which varies wildly in different states, school districts, grade levels, etc--you're not going to see any big dips.

Easter '14 was very late in April so we traveled at the very end of March and into April. Rates were 2-3x what we normally see flying out of Detroit. We ended up just driving.

If you consider driving, best thing to do is either drive through the night or make a stop half way. It's going to be a long trip no matter how you cut it.

Driving through the night you can literally knock-out half of the trip while kids are sleeping. But you need to be extra careful for safety reasons and you have to watch that the adults don't exhaust themselves so thoroughly that you end up ruining the trip. Arrive late afternoon so that you'll have immediate access to the hotel room. Last thing you want to do is arrive at 8-9am and find that you'll be homeless for another 8 hours.

The upshot is with the savings, you can probably splurge on a bunch of things to keep the kids happy. Flights for us would have been in the $1600 neighborhood. Driving easily saved $1000...so I didn't hesitate to spend over $100 on new DVDs, iTunes downloads and video games for the kids to play in the car.

You could also consider whether there are any destinations along the way that are worth stopping. Some attraction or scenic place for sight-seeing that you wouldn't have been able to appreciate from 20,000' in the air.

Good luck.

 

[deb010305]

Well we booked our BWV for April vacation. This will be our first trip ever in April, generally we go in November for the F&W. With my oldest entering High School and the demands of her sports we decided to go in April. Now my DW is concerned about flight cost. So far Jet Blue put rates out there as well as a few others for crazy $$. For the seasoned April travelers what would the best time be to grab April flights? We also considered driving but 22 hours in a car with 4 kids, how would I even plan that????

Not sure where or when your April vacation is. We are in MA and 2 years ago we gave up flying during April vacation, when airfare started out at $625 per person round trip. I stopped checking when it was up to $852 and talked DH into driving. Now we just plan on driving.

 

[jillmc40]

If u are flying from a spot that has southwest wait for their schedule to open up. We are in nj but we will drive an hour to Philly to catch a direct southwest flight! Hop on their site when the schedule opens. I went during Easter week last year and they didn't kill us.

 

[jtkboston]

We're doing a cruise during MA's april break, and yes the flights are insane. We booked a connecting flight on jetBlue (via DCA) to save about $400 per person vs. the non-stops BOS/MCO.

If you can deal with Manchester airport, do try to book with Southwest at 6am or 7am (I forget which) on the day they open up reservations for April school break. We did that in 2013 and it was pricy but not as bad as jetBlue out of Boston.

http://www.southwest.com/html/travel-tools/index.html says when they will open up the next set of dates for booking.

 

[sgb1975]

We're in MA, and just booked our flights for April 2015. My wife is a teacher so now we're pretty much restricted to Disney trips during school vacations and such. *However*, our secret was being flexible with dates...she was able to use her 2 vacation/personal days at the end of school vacation, for the Mon and Tues when school starts again, and the difference in flight $ was half!

Initially when we started pricing things out, a Sunday (super early flight out) to Saturday (late flight back) trip, out of Boston, non-stop was about $2k for the 3 of us. Moving it to mid-week flights was the game-changer. Going from Tuesday to Tuesday, same flight times, plus 1 extra night(!!!), was less than half and cost us just under $900 total. If there's any flexibility with your dates, then do your homework and play around with dates and flights and you may find a good deal.