When to purchase airline tickets?

[Brenda in CA]

My family and I are going to Maui for a week this summer. Some friends are letting us stay in their timeshare, so other than the tax, our stay is free.

We are going in June and I need to find airfare for our family of 6 (me, dh, dd15, dd12, dd7, dd3). Our goal is to find airfare for $400 or less per person. When I look at airfare now, everything is around $650 and higher per person.

Is there a "best" time to shop for airfare in relation to when your trip is?

When I first started looking in December, airfare was going for around $1000 for our dates. Will it continue to get cheaper? And at what point does it usually start to get more expensive again?

DH keeps saying we're going to have to cancel the trip if prices don't go down, but I keep telling him we need to wait and see what the airline prices do.

 

[Gigi22]

I am no expert, and I am in another country, but I did recently find a very good deal ($89 and $99 per person, on flights through two of our major hub airports to and from Orlando) that I was able to tell others about on the boards. I was registered with that airline to get email notification of good deals, and also with a kind of pricing alert service. But, I wasn't getting very satisfactory results. So, what I did was kind of time-consuming. I picked an airline that I liked and that fit my criteria (it had non-stop flights out of a local airport) and I checked their prices on a daily basis for about 2 weeks. I was able to get a sense of when the prices went up and down, and then I waited, and kept monitoring. And, lucky for me, in about a month to six weeks, I found really good prices.
Not saying that this is the best method, but it worked for me.