It's finally time to make our spring trip to Italy official! My parents have committed to watching our daughter for two weeks, so I'm ready to start doing some more concrete planning. Which brings me to plane tickets. I've been looking at flights for months, and they have pretty much stayed the same - $1200 roundtrip - planning to fly into Venice and out of Rome. I would be willing to do a roundtrip in and out of one city, but there are no savings for that I can find on the standard websites. I live in Jackson Hole, WY so we never have cheap fares, but checking from Salt Lake (the nearest major airport which is 4-5 hours away) it is the same price. We are very flexible with our dates and are just looking for a roughly two week trip sometime in April and May.

I get that flights are really expensive these days, but I'm hoping to find a better deal. My mom suggested using a consolidator. I don't really know how to find a reputable one, or what the options are, or if I should only go that route through a travel agent. There are several older threads on Fodor's regarding consolidators, but websites change so fast and new ones are always popping up, so I wanted to get some up-to-date feedback. I expect that consolidators won't have offerings out of Jackson Hole, but we are fine to drive to SLC.

Any thoughts?

I have not had luck with consolidators. I stopped using them when their prices were no better than what I found on kayak.com.

First, start collecting empirical data. Use daily fare alert like kayak.com. The alert cannot do multi-city, but you get a good indication of the price movement by doing round-trip alert using the arrival airport and another one with the departing airport. There is no longer a fixed place where you find low fares. Sometimes an third party travel site offer better price/route while other times, the carrier itself offer better prices. Kayak tells you which site are offering the price on that day. While I have seen inexplicable sudden dip in system wide prices lasting just a day in the past, the carriers are getting better at controlling these kind of price swings in our favor. Kayak gives you the price trend, so when it comes to actually buying tickets, you have a data showing where in the price swing you are trying to buy tickets. Prices are "usually" not good way ahead and near the departures. I think the carriers figure that only people who MUST fly on that date book way ahead or at the last minutes and they have no incentives to give low prices to people who would book tickets on specific dates anyway.

I disagree that prices aren't usually "good way ahead" and I'd really like to know just what set of data that assertion is based upon.

We DO know that prices are computer-based and that tickets are priced based on the competition on a particular route (or "market") and that the computer knows what the break-even point on any flight is.

Prices change all the time so nobody can tell you when there will be a sale, if there will be a sale, etc., and everything that happened "last year" was just that: LAST year.

I would sign up for the fare alerts on Kayak; you could also look at prices on skyscanner.com

And as to booking way ahead (which I did a few weeks ago for a trip to Italy and Switzerland next summer) do not be afraid to take what some might think of as an "unusual" route.

Instead of flying non-stop into Rome and then back from Barcelona (to/from Washington, DC) we are, instead flying through Montreal on the outbound and back through Toronto on Air Canada. The savings vs United: well over $2000 for two tickets.

You can wait if you want and good luck.

You are about 10 years late for deals via consolidators.
Check Kayak and ITAsoftware often and pray.

The price trend depends on market conditions. I start collecting actual bookable prices starting 11 months (way) ahead. Looking at actual empirical data for my market, the prices at the 11 month points have been high side for my market. At some point, the carriers start tinkering with prices to both high and low directions. I buy tickets when the variation is on the lower side based on actual data presented by price alert. I recommend collecting empirical data for the relevant market. In case of my market,looking at years of empirical data I collected, 11 months ahead have never offered the best prices.

Thanks all. Sounds like I will avoid the consolidator route and stick to what I have been doing. I do have fare alerts set with Kayak, but I just haven't seen any movement. Sounds like maybe I will wait just a little longer to see if there are any changes. The nice thing is that I have a lot of flexibility so can take advantage of any sales on specific dates. Of course, it would be shot to the gut if the prices go up even further, but hopefully, that won't happen. Fingers crossed! Thanks again.

I bought tickets in February for a trip from Boston to Naples in October. I knew I was paying more than I would have to if I waited, but I found flights that left and arrived when I wanted, made only one stop in Rome with decent connection times, so I bought them. The price was excruciating: $1300 each through BudgetAir (Alitalia website wasn't better and was difficult to work with). I called BudgetAir to do my seat selection and they were very helpful, got us excellent seats. I called Alitalia (severaltimes over the intervening months) to make sure the flights hadn't changed and we still had the same seats. Ok so far (we leave 10/2).
I signed up for Yapta price alerts on the same flights just to see what I might have paid for the tickets had I waited and so I could share the info on Fodor's. I have received many many alerts of price drops since then, with the least the price came down being $168, many alerts in the $200 range, but there were four eye-popping price drops in July: $300, $458, $522, and $492. I'm still glad I bought the tickets, as painful as it was, when I did, but using the price alerts is very helpful, as long as you can jump on a good deal when you see it.

What gailw mentioned reminded me of one of the many annoying things the airlines can do. Like gailw, I paid premium to book flights with better connections, departure, and arrival time. Two month before the trip, the carried informed me that my flight got canceled and rerouted me to different flights . I could have bought the rerouted itinerary cheaper at the time I booked the flight. The airline managed to extract premium pricing on less desirable route. What is even more annoying is that a week after they supposedly canceled my flight, they re instituted another flight with different flight number leaving just a few minutes later. Of course I called the airline immediately only to find that the new flight was already full -- really?

yes, Greg -- I had read about someone else's experience here (or maybe an earlier post of yours?) which is why I called Alitalia almost monthly to check on the existence of the flights and seats. I'm not totally confident that they STILL won't change it, in fact.
I'm also a little nervous at the moment because our B&B host who has responded almost immediately to previous emails hasn't yet returned my message from Sunday to confirm reservation and also find out if there's WiFi in the inn (last minute business for SO will require emails while we're gone). I hope this is just a glitch...

Greg - what a terrible experience and really speaks to why I believe so many people are frustrated with the airline industry. I understand that in adjusted dollars flights have come down significantly in price since the advent of the airline industry, and that I'm getting to fly around the world in a matter of hours. But what I don't understand is why the pricing isn't more transparent, that it's virtually impossible to make a purchasing decision with all of the relevant information, and that even after I have made a purchase, there are no guarantees. Oh well. I guess unless I lose my wanderlust, I will have to find a way to deal. I should be so lucky to have this problem!