I’m looking to buy tickets for our trip to Spain starting late July 2011 .

We will depart LA for Barcelona. For our trip home, we will depart from Madrid for LA (this is what you term open jaw, right?).

Is it too early to start looking? When is the best time to buy? What would you consider ‘reasonable’ fare?

Fyi, our trip will coincide with World Youth Day (Aug 15-21), which my 2 nieces (19, 16 yo) and 1 nephew (18 yo) are attending, so there might be a crunch of attendees. This will probably mean higher fares although we are arriving early (late july, maybe the 28th) and leaving Aug 23 or thereabouts.

I’m looking to see how much experienced travelers/Fodorites might expect to pay for airfare given these circumstances.

Thanks very much for any and all responses.

You can book flights starting from about 11 months before your trip - your trip is within that range, so you can book anytime. Whether you should do it now or wait - I don't know. I just booked a flight to Spain for next month and got round trip SFO to Madrid for about $850. That's November though. I haven't priced tickets to Spain in the summer, but to Germany and Italy, it seems that summer fares run about $1200-1500. Hopefully someone else has some strategies for finding lower prices.

I just got tickets to Italy for the spring for just over $900; when I started looking a couple of months ago, they were $1200. I set up a fare alert on kayak.com for several routes (I'm going with a friend who lives in a different city, so in/out of both our towns, for example, or into Barcelona/out of Madrid and vice versa). Kayak sent me an email last week and the price had dropped, so we started doing research in earnest and bought tickets tonight.

Basically, I decide how much I'm comfortable with paying (for Italy, given the prices over the summer, anything under $1000 was great), and then watch it for awhile to see what happens. Kayak has great graphs where you can see if the price is going down or up, and if you search every week or two you can tell also. And now that I've bought, I am NOT going to torture myself by searching again only to find that the price dropped!

And yes, the ticket you want is called either "open jaw" or "multi-city" (most of the airline and travel sites say multi-city).

All your question are impossible to answer and those who do are, at best, guessing. Saw a recent articles that suggested that next summer airfares could be as much as 20% higher. Use one of the farecompare.com site or something similar to see what the prices in the past have been. July/August is peak so you should expect to pay the highest price of the season. Good luck.

Thank you everyone. All input has been very informative. I'm happy I have ballpark figures at least. Tips and links are also greatly greatly appreciated.

I'm not sure I'm going about this the right way. Book tickets THEN do the research for places to go? Wonder how others do it?

Oh by the way, I've read it's best to book flights between Tuesday and Thursday (so I assume Friday to Monday travel is more expensive?). Is that so?

And when do airfare price changes come out? I might have misread this. But I picked this up from somewhere around here. I read it usually changes prices on Wednesdays? Did I read this wrong?

Again, thanks to everyone who have answered. Fodorite posters are always so helpful.

I think you cannot generalize the pricing on weekends vs mid-week flights.

Though one contributing factor could be with connecting flights, i.e. if you have to change planes somewhere in Europe to get to Barcelona. To get the low fare, there have to be seats for the low fare both on your planned transatlantic as well as on your intra-European feeder flights.

Since Barcelona is one of the top weekend getaway destinations you find a higher demand for flights on Friday afternoons/evenings to BCN and Sunday evenings/nights leaving BCN.

So some low fares on weekends can sell out faster than during midweek because the connecting flights are sold out in that fare class while the transatlantic leg would still be available.

For example, when I had to leave BCN on an 8am flight to Munich, half of the passengers had been Americans connecting to somewhere in the US in Munich.
So even a midweek morning flight can sell out the allocated amount of low fares sooner than a weekend midday flight leaving BCN.

Cowboy, I had to read that twice but I got your point. Thank you.

Here's a possiblity for you:

go to www.itasoftware.com which is an aggregator site (they don't sell tickets but will link you to the carriers).

You can use the "month-long" view to see when in July tthe airfares would be lowest but be aware that the numbers are based on current data and they can change quite rapidly.

NOBODY and that includes EVERYBODY here knows when airfares will be lower or higher or when there will be so-called "sales" since all the so-called "experience" is based on PAST activity.

Those so-called "fare" sites might do a lot of predicting based on PAST activity as well as some economic activity the general public may or may not know about.

quest2travel - when I said "started researching in earnest" I may not have been exactly clear. We absolutely did research beforehand and had a pretty firm idea of what our plans were. But when I saw the ticket prices drop I looked harder at the finer details before buying, and I looked at switching around the order of our trip to see if it saved us on airfare. But my personality is to triple-check.

On my last big trip it was cheaper to fly midweek, but on this one there was practically no difference in price. Nobody can tell you what will happen for sure - just search for some different scenarios.

Quest, did you try Kayak?

I plugged your dates into www.kayak.com and basic return flights to Barcelona in July are around $1200+.

Your exact dates for open jaw came in at $1278 on AA.

It's a starting point! Good luck!

I purchased my tickets for Europe in July 2011 in late August ($817 for open jaw Boston to London, Paris to Boston with a stop over in Iceland on the way out).

Typically sales are peak at 3 to 4 months prior to flight date. However, not every year is normal. Also keep in mind that airlines sometimes have a cash flow problem and can throw in a sale at any time to fill the gap, and promotional fares for new routes, expanded service, etc. can pop up now and then as well.

We usually have a pretty good idea where we are going before we buy our plane tickets - not an entire itinerary mapped out, but a general idea. Then once we buy the tickets, we can start firming up our itinerary.

"Typically sales are peak at 3 to 4 months prior to flight date." I wouldn't count on that for summar peak travel. That was the mantra of a fellow on the Rick Steves board; he was kicked off last July, in part due to complaints from people who followed his advice, waited to book, and saw fares just go up and up as summer approached. The "summer sales" never materialized, at least for reasonable routes. And the people who waited ended up not only with higher airfares but had difficulty booking their hotels in popular destinations.

For summer travel from the West Coast of the US, where you are and I am too, I've never seen prices lower than $1150 for the type of flight we want (one-stop flights with the first stop in Europe, not the US). And I haven't seen that fare in a number of years. Since 2005 we have paid $1225 or higher, and last summer it was around $1450 for the particular route we flew on British Airways. And while predictions are just that---predictions---I have not seen any speculation that summer fares might be less in 2011 than they were in 2010. Most economic factors point to them going higher. And apparently some cash-poor airlines are offering good fares now.

Yes, you may find a great deal later here and there, but generally those are for long and complicated routes with multiple stops or long layovers. Personally, I would not take one of those. Nor would I wait for last-minute deals and then scramble for hotels at peak season, particularly if traveling with a family.

Sites like Kayak that show the prices for each day of the week are good if your dates are slightly flexible. Watch for awhile and get a feel for what they are doing, and then book when you see a good price on a route that makes sense (no 25-hour ordeals). Also check individual airline sites if you have any favorites.

I would try to book my flights by January and then get busy with the hotels or apartments---that is the fun part. I've booked our spring trip to Spain (flying in to Barcelona and out of Madrid, like you) and found some nice advance-booking rates for hotels, especially in Barcelona.

I've been flying to Europe every summer for years. EVERY year I hear that the price will be up and up and over a thousand dollars and every year so far, I have paid less than that. BUT I have monitored fares from January on and pretty much always buy my tickets late February until April, when I find a sale. But this requires vigilance. I have actually gotten sale fares by calling the airline before the sale was posted on their website. I think it is way too early to buy for next summer, but if you are willing to pay the price you can buy any time you want.

rbnwdlr---where are you flying from? Some markets are more competetive than others.

When I first looked (around May/June), fares weren’t available yet. Now I’m back and have the same fare price as others have here. I see now there’s really no firm rule for everyone regarding timing. Just have to be steady at looking up prices (thanks for all the links). I especially note Enzian’s post since we live around the same area. (I notice THAT makes a difference too).

Looking for hotels and/or apartments will be a breeze after this. I can only wish!

Thanks everyone. I need all the luck I can get.

I wonder how others can say they enjoy planning? I might if not for the nitty gritty.

Plane tickets always stress me out the most for this very reason. After that, for me it gets fun.

We are sort of in the same area (West Coast), but prices from LAX should be at least $100+ better than what we can get from Seattle. Not as good as New York, but better than some smaller markets.

I always enjoy the hotel/apartment planning the most. I book directly with the property )not through third-party websites) and as much as possible by direct e-mail so there is some conversation back and forth.

How many of you will be traveling together? You may do better with apartments than hotels. Some of them are attached to hotels so you don't have to deal with agencies or owners, which may be difficult if you don't speak Spanish or Catalan. For example, look at the apartment option at Hotel Sixty-Two in Barcelona, on Passieg de Gràcia. We thought about this for our trip but don't know if we will be 2 or 4 at this point.

Enzian, there are the 3 kids. Their mother is tentative.

Two years ago, through the help of this site (links given), we (same group, with mom) booked apartments in London and Paris. It was wonderful! We truly did enjoy our stay at our chosen apartments and the experience on our own in the cities. Yes, much better than we did our package tour between the 2 cities. (Shush! I felt intimidated hustling luggage/hotels/transportation for 4 inexperienced companions and myself). Now, with experience under our belts, we feel more adventurous and feel we can venture on our own. (Gahhh. God help us!)

I just so want to get over this hump. I feel after this, things will get easier. Look, even wading through kayak is a challenge. (As with other links, I don’t know how to get to the graphs where you can compare your price day to day). I guess I’m not too good at following instructions?? Talk about technically challenged.

But thanks everyone. Fodorites never fail.

I did a search for the dates/cities in your original post, but it looks like Kayak may not provide charts for multicity searches. You might get a decent idea by doing searches for round trips to both Madrid and Barcelona. Obviously that's not what you would buy eventually, but it might give you an idea of what fares to those cities have been doing. Once you do the search, look on the lefthand side and click "show fare charts."