March airfare - WTH?!?!?!

[tjrutkowski]

Just check Continental for a Nov 2012 trip and the tickets are $150 more each than I just paid in 2011.

 

[ellie&mattys mom]

I was waiting for awhile to buy my March 31 best deal I could get was $180 one way now it is $343 going home I got $80!!

 

[JJSWDW]

Also include all the mergers into the factors about the airfares. Even though several airlines still use their own names, they are owned by others. So there are fewer choices. I have seen fares drop several weeks before the trip. However to play this game you have to be prepared to drive. It's about 20 hours for us so we'd rather not but I am not going to pay twice what it costs to drive in airfare either. They have figured out that people don't just value the cost savings of flying but that theres a large, intangible value on time these days with shorter family vacations.

 

[greenclan67]

I think I was one of the lucky ones! For the last 4 years we have flown from Buffalo on eithier AT or Jetblue. The most I have paid was $99 each way in previous years. The lowest I can get on any of those airlines and by moving some dates around was maybe $129 plus taxes and fees. We are going March 10th to 23rd, so flying a sat to Fri. I just happened to be on the Allegiant air website, as they had released airfares from Niagara Falls, NY, to Sanford Orlando, (which they aren't starting to fly to Sanford until mid Feb) and got my flights that day for $69.00 each way, plus baggage and taxes, fees! But I still only paid just under $900 for all 4 of us! I am not complaining, but they were really hard to find this year. Those same flights are now up to $273.00 down, and $119 back! They went up rather quickly to!
Good luck finding airfare, it has been a tough year for it. Now if I could just find a decent car rental price from Sanford!

 

[DebbieB]

Adding...

As another poster mentioned, it doesn't appear to be supply and demand. There are tons of open seats on the planes. So there is still plenty of supply - we're breaking one of the basic rules of econ 101 here.

And we flew from Chicago to Orange County for a DL trip last year for spring break - that was just over $300 (pre-taxes) I think. And going to the west coast is always a more expensive ticket from the midwest.

I just checked going out west for comparison - under $400. So it appears the airlines are just killing the trips to the southeast.

They want to see how many will give in and pay it. June 2009 was the last time I flew SW from PIT. They wanted around $365 roundtrip. I ended up leaving a day earlier to get an award ticket, I used Starwood points for the Swan before checking into AKV. I watched the prices and it never went down, in fact it went over $400. The plane was soldout on the day of the flight so everyone must have broken down and paid it.

 

[TaraPA]

If anyone's watching Airtran, check your flights today. The one I had been watching daily since December dropped from $245 one way to $87! The one I had booked was $137 one way, it's down to $117, I called & they credited my account the $20 difference.

I might have just gotten very lucky, but go check your Airtran dates!

 

[Dallas_Lady]

It's not just March, the summer is ridiculous as well. $450 rt from DFW to MCO when last summer it was $250. we have driven to Florida the last two trips and I really wanted to fly this time, but we may be hitting the road again. I refuse to spend $2000 on airfare unless I am leaving the country.

 

[Brian Noble]

As another poster mentioned, it doesn't appear to be supply and demand. There are tons of open seats on the planes. So there is still plenty of supply - we're breaking one of the basic rules of econ 101 here.

Don't count on it. Even Disney's own quarterly reports consistently say that people are planning their vacations much closer to the event, rather than farther in advance. There are still plenty of people who have yet to decide what they are doing for Spring Break, and there is still plenty of time to fill that plane.

What's more, with capacity reductions that have taken place throughout the industry, it's okay if some people who might have flown for less don't fly this year---the planes I am on are still flying full most of the time, and the fares on those planes are up.

I said it before, but this is a spring break roundtrip between a snow belt city and Florida. If we were back in the days with a ton of excess capacity and more competition, that might not matter. Those days are gone.

 

[pinkteacup]

Don't give up yet. I was able to book airfare last week for our spring break trip at the end of March for $650.00 (tax included) for 4 tickets, Chicago-ORD to MCO. This was on American, I had a coupon code, but even without the code it would have still been under $800.00, a good spring break price in my opinion. The Kayak app was really helpful too. I have still been checking it and still find fares around $200 on United. Good luck