airline tickets: when/how to buy
 

I keep reading that flying open jaw isn't much more than RT tickets, but when I check (RT,BWI-LON vs. BWI-LON + Venice-BWI), I find a difference of $150 to $200, which seems big, compared to rail travel (w/pass). Am I missing something?

Also, if I'm reading correctly, advice about when to buy tends to say: be patient - in late March/early April prices drop for the summer. Am I misinterpreting? (The wait is making me a tad nervous...)

Open jaw is often not much more than r/t, but you have to consider the r/t costs of both cities. In this case, the r/t costs of BWI-LON and r/t VCE-BWI.

If there are airlines, or partnerships, that go both of those routes, then you may find that the open jaw costs split the difference between the two r/t prices. London is probably about the cheapest city to fly to from the US due to having the most competition.

I can't answer as far as summer prices, as we don't travel to Europe in the summer. We usually buy like 2-3 months out unless a deal comes along sooner. I guess some last minute fares may surface, but I'm a little uncomfortable holding out until the last minute.

Keep in mind that you are also saving yourself backtracking time when you fly out of a different city.

Rail? London to Venice? See www.ryanair.com instead.

This year, some incredible price drops - - some lasting less than 8 hours have - - already occurred in late February or early March.

Best wishes,

Rex

mberry,

Are you looking at the airline sites or a service like Expedia? In my experience the open jaw tickets tend to be lower at the airline sites.


Keith

Rex - I was watching in February, but the low cost flights I saw were only good for travel through 4/4. Perhaps I just missed the 8 hour bargains. What strategy would help me find those?

(I knew you'd recommend flying locally. Here's my honest confession: I'm afraid of flying. The trip over and back will be enough of a challenge.)

Hi mb,

Could you come back by way of Rome? That might be cheaper.

I've never paid more for an open-jaw ticket, but you have to consider the airports. When I say I didn't pay more, I mean no more than half of each RT fare, added together. You can't compare fares from Venice to only RT London and expect them to be the same because Venice is a lot more expensive to fly to or from. Why don't you compare that fare to RT Venice and see what that fare is? $150 extra fare from Venice compared to London return doesn't surprise me, even one-way.

I think you can wait a bit to book airfare for summer.

Ah! Well, all this advise makes sense - thanks. I'll have to check open jaw from a few other cities and compare that to the cost (in time/money) of backtracking (on a rail pass, preferably overnight).

Christina: how much longer should I wait? Might prices go up, rather than down?

>Might prices go up, rather than down? <

Maybe.

You ought to do your searching using WAS as your departure/return city. That will get you fares for BWI, Dulles, and Washington National.

Alitalia has a nonstop between Milan and Dulles.

I see that Alitalia has a $299 roundtrip to anywhere in Italy from Dulles between March 28 and April 30.

mberry: there are no guarantees, but I almost always go to France in the summer (end of June, early July), and I don't book until May, usually. I watch the internet fares every day or so, and if I see that there are good fares appearing, I call my consolidator, who usually manages to get me something equivalent or cheaper. It's worked for me for about 15 years.

You can usually estimate the cost of an open jaw by adding up the two round-trip fares, for example BWI LON BWI and BWI VCE BWI then dividing the result by 2.

The big buts to this are if different carriers are involved, in which case the OJ might look closer to two one-ways (i.e., silly) or if one of the airports is not a transatlantic hub, e.g. VCE.

Many Euro-zone national carriers are probably going to be raising their fares (in USD) rather than lowing them, thanks to the demise of the dollar against the €, so now might turn out to be the best time.

FYI. This is an excerpt from an email sent to me this morning by a colleague: "We just booked our honeymoon and you'll never believe it--$530 roundtrip each! The fares we had been finding were a thousand dollars for each of us! We booked on some sort of promo fare offered thru Northwest airlines, which seemed restricted to limited dates, but we're so flexible. so we're going 7/6-8/4.

I had this itch to get the tickets booked, and was getting nervous about prices climbing, so I've been searching around. I happened upon Orbitz and always chose random dates (because we're so flexible) and it came up with $530 on Northwest. I couldn't believe my eyes, so I went directly to NWA and found the same price for the same dates. As soon as we tried to change the dates back and forth, the price shot up to $1400, so there was something magical about those numbers. We quickly got out the credit card and booked! We keep looking at the printed receipt to make sure it was real! We're flying into and out of Paris, with a stop in Detroit on each trip.

Oops! Bride and groom are flying from San Francisco to Paris.

Betsy - forgive me for being dense, but I didn't understand the "oops" in your second post.

I can't be quite as flexible as the honeymooners, but I will try the random date strategy and see what I get.

Thanks.

I think thqat the "oops" was simply for omitting the details (origination, destination) from her earlier post.

perhaps somebody can clue me in to how somebody did a flexible date search for European destination on Orbitz when Orbitz only allows a flexible date search for US and Canada destinations. I had thought perhaps the previous poster meant Expedia, but that site only does that type of search for their "most popular destinations" (and all listed were US or Canada also). Also, does anybody know of a site where you can do this type of search for European destinations.

Travelocity.