Fall airfare deals...how long should one wait?
 

We've got a family trip (9 tickets) coming up in late September. Traveling from Denver to LA.

We're traveling on what we've researched to be one of the cheapest days of the year, and traveling on low days-- Saturday to Thursday. We're doing all we can to get these costs down, but for the past 2 months, the airfare has been at or even slightly above the cost to travel in the height of summer.

Stands to reason that this is going to come down, but with so many tickets to buy, I'm wondering if any one has thoughts on risk/reward of waiting this out.

Related question: anyone heard of a way to negotiate a volume discount?

Thanks for reading! Bigger thanks if you've got any advice.

As with everything else, there is not total agreement about the cheapest days to fly. Check out this website.

http://www.farecompare.com/travel-ad...avel-insiders/

Try this service, as you can get updates on the cheapest fares. Set your dates and check it out.

http://www.airfarewatchdog.com/cheap...-colorado-den/

Also u can have Kayak send u fare updates. Generally there are sales in mid summer for fall airfares, but who knows? I was watching an international fare for mid September and suddenly it dropped by close to $400. I jumped on it and within a few days it went right back up.

I thought Tues, Wednesdays and Saturdays r the least expensive days to fly. Good luck!

Southwest --

Denver to Burbank, non stop, using random dates Sat [9/15] return Thurs [9/20]= $116 each way.

Same dates for LAX $123 each way.

With Southwest, the earlier you book, the better the fare. Not sure what prices you are finding, but these seem really low.

Thanks all for the responses. We just booked. Flights for September didn't start to discount until first week in June. Second week the went down a lot with some short term sales. Flights that were 240 RT last week went to 198 RT yesterday, and dropped another 10 or 20 today based on travel dates. For now, September fares are well below summer prices.

Lesson (this time at least) seems to be that fall sales don't show up until Summer has started.

Who did you book with, just curious?

Frontier. Southwest prices matched, but in the free bags (pro) versus no seat assignments (con), we chose frontier for the ability to get seat assignments.

Thanks for your responses DebitNM!

And, we got pretty good rates Sat-Thursday. Even better rates Sat-Sat.

I had been stalking the SW website for months to get flights from Columbus, OH to New Orleans in September. Finally their 72 hour sale came up and after waiting a few hours, lots of other airlines jumped on board. We really liked the Delta offerings better but unfortunately, while piddling around finalizing DH's wishes, the flights we wanted shot back up to normal sky high. I called Delta and they still had cheaper seats on our wanted flights available so we booked and paid the up charge for talking to a very nice human being. The crazy thing is that even with that cost and the probable future cost to check in a bag Delta is still cheaper than SW. Whazzup with that one??

Moral of the story, there's no logic involved with air fares.

I find that often SWA does not have the least expensive air fares.