Am going to Paris 1/1/10 and airfares are now at $815 per person non-stop from Boston via Air France. Many people have told me to wait thta it will decline but I am sceptical and do not want to lose out on a non-stop. What do you think? Thanks for the help.

I had the same decision to make. Planning my MAY 2010 trip. The cheapest trip I found from JFK TO CDG non stop was AMERICAN AIR. The fare was $777 after checking all airlines for several days I decided to book the ticket. I wanted to book my apartment since I have found that the apartments that I am interested in are getting booked already for next year. I am not interested in gambling that the ticket price will go down. In the 2 week period that I

sorry my response was not completed. In the 2 week period that I was checking rates the American rate had gone up about $50. I now have my ticket and 1 less thing to plan. I feel that I made the right decision for me. I think that it is a purely personal decision, I am not a gambler and glad that my ticket is now bought at a fairly reasonable rate of $777.

Have a great trip.

On the one hand, fares might go down a little for winter travel, starting around November. On the other hand, you want to travel on a weekend + holiday date (New Years Day, Friday) so that will cost a little more anyway. Pretend book and see if the flights are filling up yet. If not, you can wait. If yes, then go for it.

How will pretend booking tell you if the flights are filling up?

IMHO for a holiday I wouldn't wait too long. You might try the Kakay and other websites, but I have been monitoring ATL to CDG and the best I have seen is $670 and that's NOT a holiday period. And it's not 'non stop'

sign up for www.kayak.com fare alert. that is how i knew of a one day sale on nwa. we got non stop RT SEA_AMS for $548.00 per person. This is the least i have paid in my 5 trips to Europe since 1999.

i was doing the same thing this past summer flying to zurich. the fares did go down but in order to change my fare Delta charged $250.00 to rebook, so the fare had to go down 250 in order to make it valuable. if the fares are that low i would book it and forget about it. ...... check out delta. they just started serving alot of destinations in europe nonstop from the northeast and i found fares for under $600.00....

I'e been watching fares from DC to Paris for January and they have been pretty steady for about 2 months. They were about $50 lower in June/early July. My experience has been that usually u can catch a fare sale sometimes starting in later September or around Thanksgiving time. Don't know about availability on the holiday though and agree that the fare will likely be higher for that portion of your flight.

To "pretend book" -- just go to the airline website and plug in your dates and go thru the screens until u can see the screen that asks to select seats or some have a view seats right off the bat....obviously don't hit anything that says u are buying the seats! Also on some sites, like kayak.com and Bing.com, they show u the available seats when they show the flights.

I hate to point this out, but "pretend" booking shows you SEATS not taken which is NOT always related to tickets sold.

I fly a lot and have had flights where it looked like every seat was sold out go out almost empty and vice versa. For a lot of reasons some folks don't book seats in advance. Some tour groups buy tickets and don't book seats for example. So... seat maps are not always reliable. You MIGHT call and ask the airline or there are booking engines that show availalble by fare class. (ITA comes to mind)