Flight Pricing Help!

[Kimmers127]

My DH and I are hoping to go down to WDW 8/16/12 - 8/25/12. I'm looking at airfare and the best I'm seeing is $400 pp round trip... which is really high for our area. Can anyone help me figure out a way to get this number way down? We are flying out of BDL (Hartford, CT) and looking for nonstop flights. I usually get an early morning flight out of Hartford and a late afternoon/early evening flight out of Orlando, and we usually spend like $200 pp... so the $400 has me !! TIA!

 

[backyardponder]

Welcome to the world of expensive tickets. If you happen to find a good price, that's the day to go buy a lottery ticket too.

If you google "when to buy airline tickets", you will find some recent newspaper articles with some suggestions. One I found is from the NY Times at http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/travel/book-well-ahead-to-save-money-on-airfare.html. There's lots of other articles as well.

My guess is those dates you have are during a heavy travel period...school vactions ending, kids going to college, etc. You may be stuck paying that or jumping in a car and heading down I-95.

Good Luck!

 

[rpierce99]

I know some will say wait, but unless you see a trend of the prices getting higher, I'd say wait. It depends on your risk tolerance, obviously, but I started looking for flights a few months ago for my June-July trip and the tickets were regularly $185/leg on google.com/flights and $225 for Southwest, but the prices weren't moving, so I waited. I checked every day and caught a sale on Southwest for the flight down at $172 (no bag fees! yay!) but still had no flight back. I waited and waited and waited some more and ended up scoring return flights at $137.80 on AirTran on the way back.

Compared to paying $400 r/t p/p when we first started looking, we ended up paying about $300 r/t p/p and got free bags for the flight down, saving my family over $400.

The important thing is to check daily, both google.com/flights (my personal preference, any of the travel search sites will work, they all have the same prices these days) and southwest/jetblue individually if they are available at your airport because they aren't in the aggregators.

Good luck!