We are looking for mid to late May departures from Minneapolis for about 2 weeks. We aren't the types who book trips way, way out and prefer to make plans later on. Often, in other years, we've booked our European trips for May and other time periods 3 to 6 weeks out and found good fares. So, if that would happen again this year I'd think that prices might start dropping soon as the airlines realize they have seats to fill. But, I keep reading about much lower capacities this year because there are fewer flights. When we went to Mexico over the holidays, flights never did drop in price, but that was also peak season. We have departure/return date flexibility and we are open to flying to different European cities.

Anyone have any insights? Anyone seen any evidence of a downward slide in prices coming up for late spring? Thanks.

Aer Lingus sale are the lowest prices I've seen for a while. Under $700 return to London Heathrow in May but since the sale started I've seen prices rise especially for the peak summer season.
I think that's a good price for May and it's unlikely to get better.

I am wondering when the pricepoint will reached....how much longer can we all take this?! I have seen no downward trend at all! Bummer....

Aerlingus if you can leave from Chicago, Boston, or New York. We do ff miles to one of those departures and then take Aerlingus at around $800.

I think the airlines have severely restricted capacity this year, keeping prices high. To get some sense of what's going on, a good place to check out is the "buzz" portion of Kayak.com. It's fairly well hidden on there so you will need to dig for it.

We recently booked April fares on Delta nonstop from ATL to ZRH for $702.

We were pleased with the price.

Byrd

The "Buzz" feature is neat. You find it under "more" on the kayak site. I initially tried $750 as a maximum fare and didn't get any results. When I raised it to $800 I got some Ireland, England, and Switzerland fares.

One more thing. I just tried "Buzz" again putting in April as the search month. Doing this I came up with some fares in the high 600s, so I am encouraged. I think fares may drop as we get closer to May when they want to fill seats.

Nah, April is cheaper than May especially if you avoid Easter.

I did mention that Aer Lingus has fares for less than $700 (ie high 600's for May..

Are you waiting to save $10?

No Aer Lingus fares from MSP for May for anywhere that price. Wish there were!

No. If anything they've started going up. I was waiting and finally took the plinge.

If you haven't already discovered it , ita software

http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch

has a powerful tool that lets you search multiple departures and destinations AND a block of dates. It is pretty intuitive- check the 3 radio buttons for the type of search. The nifty part is that , if you aren't fussy about your destination, but just want to be on the continent, for example, you can plug in multiple airports separated by semicolons (eg CDG;AMS;FRA;MUC;MXP; etc) and you will get a matrix of the best scheduled fares. I don't think it works on sales, though. Good luck.

Rick

I have always used itasoftware and thy havae many fabulous features (like flexible dates and flesible lengths of stay), but I didn't realize I could do this multiple destination search. I also suspect it doesn't pickup sale fares becasue sometimes I find a better fare than itasoftware had quoted me when I go to an airlines website.