cskimberly

Hi all,

My husband and I are planning on a 11 day trip to Rome next year in May/June. (May 25 - June 5). I've been tracking how much round trip plane tickets cost for past three months and honestly it hasn't changed much. The cheapest one is Aeroflot (~$1000) with 4 and 8 hour layover in Moscow and the next one pretty much jumps to $1600 with one stop. I've looked into Aeroflot but with the flight schedule and 8 hour layover (plane leaving around midnight and then layover from 4am to 1 pm on way back home) it really isn't appealing
So at this point, I'm not sure to suck it up and buy $1600 R/T or wait for a couple more months to see if it will drop down to $1200-1400-ish?
Please advise

Christina

don't fly Aeroflot

Why do you have to buy a plane ticket this early? I'd cool my jets for some months. I presume $1600 isn't some great bargain for this route if you've been tracking it for 3 months, is it? If so, maybe, but if it's just around what it has been, I don't see any reason to buy now.

GAC

Buy in February or March of next year.

michelhuebeli

If this is really all about saving money, then you are looking in the wrong places.
The cheapest nonstops are $1392 right now, but there are a great many flights with one connection that are much cheaper.

Go to Kayak.com and sign up for price alerts to your email address. You can invent a new (free) email address if you want to keep this anonymous and separate, at google and yahoo and many others - a good idea in case there will be Spam later on. After a while those alerts will tell you what fare fluctuations you can expect.

Kayak shows similar fares to the ones at itasoftware below, for $917 and up. Also watch the graph on the left on Kayak that shows recent price movements.

Go to http://matrix.itasoftware.com, select Round Trip and use the “See calendar of lowest fares” feature, input a start date (the earliest you’d want to fly) and how many days.

I did it for LAX-FCO with May 1 and 11 days and I see roundtrip fares of $917 and $1047 and $1064, including all fees etc.

The $917 has only one connection but requires an overnight in Istanbul (arr. 5:10PM) and an early departure the next morning (8AM), or better - to make lemonade from lemons - have the evening of arrival (5:10PM) and a good part of the next day for sightseeing in Istanbul and fly out at 4:30PM, arr. Rome 6:05PM. Same fare.

Coming back you don’t have the overnight, just a decent layover in Istanbul to change planes without a panic, and a nonstop to LAX.

For $1230.70 you can fly via JFK with Delta then Alitalia (or whoever buys them out by next Spring...)

And so it goes.

Keep checking these for a while and when you have a sense of what movements and fluctuations there are, make you purchase, but there is no rush at this point.
Another way of seeing what’s really cheap (but only for those who have mastered the art of travelling very light) is a combination of legacy airline across the pond to any European airport A) where flying there is cheap and B) from where you have one of the many low-cost carriers fly to Rome. Allow for generous changeover time since the two legs won’t be on the same ticket, and add up the fares, it might be worth it.

Jean

I wouldn't fly Aeroflot for free, and with those layovers you'd be spending 2 days of your 11-day trip in the Moscow airport. The return trip in particular sounds like torture.

I'd probably wait for a short time, but personally I like to have my flights locked up pretty early so that I know my exact dates/times, get good seat assignments and know how much I've spent of my overall budget before I start booking hotels.

bobthenavigator

I agree with GAC, but monitor in the meantime.