MrsY

We are on the Eastside in Redmond, Microsoft Ville!

MrsY

Thanks for all the advice!
I think we will wait a while and hope that we will get a good price!

Englishmum

The Yapta website tracks flight prices continuously to help one choose the best time to buy air tickets. (I think I'd heard of Yapta via one of the travel magazines).

http://www.yapta.com

http://www.yapta.com/how/

They claim to be able to arrange a refund if you've purchased a ticket and then the price drops for these airlines only:

http://www.yapta.com/airline-refunds/

Review from 'Travel & Leisure" magazine: http://www.travelandleisure.com/arti...ebsites-2010/4

It might be worth a try. You can also see a graph of trends of ticket prices on http://www.kayak.com

Sadly, with oil prices seemingly on the up and up, who knows what is going to happen with flight prices? The airlines seem to continue to charge (the same high prices) for the fuel surcharge even when oil prices go down...

tonrob

How's your credit rating? Free AA miles are particularly easy to come by. Have a rummage on Flyertalk. Mrs tonrob and I have picked up around 300,000 since October without even setting foot on a plane - enough for 5 adult round-trip tickets in economy. (Flexibility re travel dates always helps redemption, so - as always - YMMV).

keaki80

Too far from me then, to meet for a cuppa!! Good luck on the Christmas flights. I'm hoping to go back about October and this time use air-miles. Unfortunately, they DO need to be booked up long in advance.

AddyLaddy

On the subject of flight prices, we want to fly to the UK from Seattle this summer but I'm not seeing any return prices much below $1300 per seat. I've been trying the yapta site but I didn't find anything much cheaper by varying the dates.

Would it be cheaper to buy the tickets in GBP via a UK site I wonder ? Are you allowed to do that ?

tonrob

If the website will let you then it is allowed. Shouldn't in theory be any cheaper as I believe the prices are set according to the country of departure rather than the country the ticket is purchased in.

keaki80

I usually fly BA. I can book online here in USA for my son to come out from UK, so the answer is yes. For other air-lines I can't say, we use Sea-Tac a lot. Shop around with the times you go to book as well. Whatever people say should be the standard, is not the case. It is a very weird set-up and no-one can seem to give a really sensible answer as to the ridiculously varying prices on the SAME flight!(I don't mean in ex-pats, I mean the people at the air-lines themselves.) I watched an airline chief explaining ticket prices and he doesn't seem to understand it either!! My son was on his computer in UK and me on mine in the USA and his was showing cheaper prices than mine, (even though I was on the UK home page!) We went with his computer and got the cheaper flight. It is a crazy situation.
The other thing is to try Vancouver, Addyladdy, sometimes their prices can vary between $100 - 200 per ticket. We chop and change. Vancouver is so much easier for us, but Sea-Tac tends to be cheaper.. but not always!!!
By the way, $1300 is a LOT!

Good luck.

AddyLaddy

Thanks keaki80, I've tried Vancouver too but it seems more expensive. Perhaps I could also look for Thomas Cook package flights out of there, but I guess they're only during the winter/ski season.
I'm mostly getting $1300-$1500 prices which is a lot especially as I need to buy 6 return tickets - ouch!
We need to get to relatives in Birmingham in the end, so I may try the Delta/KLM flight to Holland and then hop back. Probably quicker and cheaper than transporting all six of us to/from London.

tonrob

It's not that complicated. Airlines, like hotels, have demand-based pricing. The price of a ticket rises through a number of fare "buckets". An over-simplified way of looking at it is that the plane you will fly on will have the first X seats in each class sold at $X (cheap price), the next X number of seats at $XX and the next at $XXX etc. That's why numbers quoted about someone who paid whatever, whenever are usually about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.

If you want the deeper inside scoop on how airline pricing works and then use this to your advantage then be prepared to do some research on a specialized forum like Flyertalk.