Need help with airfares
 

I'm searching airfares for a trip from Boston to Barcelona in August. The lowest I've seen so far is a Alitalia flight at $720 RT routed through Milan. Is this a reasonable fare for that time of year? Can I anticipate a sale or fare war soon?

Fare war? From your lips to industry's ear! Summer sale fares, if there are any, have not yet been announced. Given that seat occupancy rates are running so high, chances are that fares will not be reduced all that much, if at all.
I just did a quick search on http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch/login and the loewst fare was $893, so maybe you should grab that $720.

Try www.skyauction.com, but beware of the extra charges. The summer charge and the surcharge are separate. So if you win an auction for a ticket for $300, and the surcharge is $220, and to travel in the summer sometime they will charge you more, so that charge may be anywhere from $50 to $300 your total ticket price could be $570 to $1020. Good luck here are some other websites that you might find good deals on www.bt-store.com www.discountair.com www.discountfares.com www.globester.com www.kaventravel.com or www.travelhub.com it also may be cheaper to fly into London, and then fly from London to Barcelona on www.ryanair.com good luck and have fun

Currently, the 720 you mention looks real good, are you sure it was dollars and included the fees and taxes?

It doesn’t even come up on Kayak for Alitalia for the randomly chosen date of 8/14, their cheapest is $895 BOS - (MXP) - BCN and back.

And on Alitalia’s site it’s Euros 583 + 162.09 = 745.09 which is near enough to $890!

Cheap flights from various airports in and around London to both Barcelona and nearby Gerona in August can be had from the low twenties (in pounds) each way. So you can figure on how much the flights from BOS to LON would have to come down before a two-hopper like that would become preferable. With the extra expense of transfers etc., and at the risk of even having to stay a night in London, this is not a likely scenario, currently Aer Lingus looks like the lowest at $756.

WK

Well, rioichiro hasn't come back to tell us if that 720 RT was including taxes and fees. I think not. I've kept an eye on that route, and even with mid-week departure the cheapest I see is USD700 and 720 which comes to just over 900 USD when fees and taxes are included.

Anything better, anyone?

Any experience with BT-store.com? I am salivating over the prices.....

Here's a link to another thread that has an alphabetical list of 78 air search (or related) sites:

http://tinyurl.com/qdzhc

I've been working on setting up a trip to Prague and Berlin in November. It will be only 9 days portal-to-portal, and we are very limited on the dates we can travel (the group includes 2 school teachers and 1 person who has a new job so his options are limited due to lack of seniority).

Anyway, I've been pricing the trip and had seen one price as low as $650 (flying into Berlin and out of Prague), but it turned out that there were additional fees of $200. Other than that, every thing I'd seen was in the $750 to $900 range for open jaw using Philly, Baltimore, or DC to fly from--and Prague and Berlin as the open jaw.

So when I read about Best Travel Store here a few days ago, I gave them a try.

To make a long story short, we did get tickets for $580 each. We normally don't buy our tickets this early, but with the limited travel window this particular group has, we went ahead with it.

I did call Best Travel Store with some questions, and the woman I spoke with was very helpful and patient.

Now we can get back to finalizing plans for our trip to Benelux in less than two weeks.

Hi all, my family and I are flying to spain in October. I am wondering if anyone knows of a website that I can use to lookup flights that has the ability to tell me what U.S. cities have the cheapest flights to Madrid or Sevilla.

Hopefully that makes sense. I don't want to lookup all the cities near me to find out which one has the cheapest flights out.

Thanks all.

acoronado- unless you get a spectacular deal coming from NYC or some other major hub (a few months ago BA had a $400 round trip ticket NYC-London), it is almost always cheaper to leave from a nearby airport, and depending on where you are located, there are probably not so many options.

To do a search like that, the easiest thing is to go to STA and tell them you are willing to leave from a variety of airports. All the search engines I know of require you to enter a specific departure airport, though sometimes there is a code that is the city plus surrounding areas (DFW is that, as is NYC).

Laclair,

Thanks for your reply. What is STA? I am unfamiliar with that, whatever it may be.

I do live in central Ohio, so there are a lot of major airports within a 4 hour, or so, drive, and a number of them are hubs (Cincy, Cleveland, and Detroit are all hubs). I agree, it's not usually worth driving to another cities airport, but on occasion it is.

STA is "Student Travel Agency" and they have offices all over the US. statravel.com will have the locations listed. It is not just for students, though, so don't get discouraged.

One thing to think of when planning how to get to an airport is who is taking you and whether you will be parking the car there or what. A 4 hour drive is probably about 240 miles (let's just say) and if the average price of gas is $3.00 a gallon, that is going to cost you around $60 round trip plus parking at the airport (about $20 per day). That can be really expensive. If someone takes you and picks you up then you are spending about $120 on gas alone, which means if the ticket is only $100 cheaper, you are not getting any kind of deal.

You mention "your family" in which case $100 per person is definitely an important difference, but think about how you will get to the airport and what you will do with the car while abroad.

It all comes down to number crunching so figure out how much it will cost for the airport in question and go from there.

Check the airport web site for access options. Metro areas also offer private limo or van service.

bking