I read in The Chicago Tribune today that high-season air fares across the Atlantic have started to drop despite the customary high prices charged in summer. Can anyone confirm or deny these price cuts?

I can tell you that a friend bought a ticket to and from Zurich for April; the price of that same trip NOW is about $400 LESS!

Hi USNR,

I haven't seen any significant price decreases out of ATL.

I haven't seen much difference in price decreases out of CLT either.

Take a quick look at

continental.com

we live in the Houston, TX area and some March dates have airfare from IAH (non-stop) to Paris, Amsterdam or London at $298 r/t, that doesn't include taxes but once they're applied it brings it up to $477 or so. Some April dates it does go up to $348 r/t + taxes.

Don't know about other airlines.
Susan

Prices for spring travel have definitely decreased, but summer fares are still high.

A friend of mine has been looking for about a month for RT NY/Milan in late June into July and hasn't seen anything under $1000.

And the fares Susan quotes are good until April 17; also some sales from EWR and CLE on CO. Perhaps more telling is that CO is already running specials on BusinessFirst from June 28 to to Sept 4 from its 3 hubs for as little as $899 OW.

A month or two ago I got tickets for June on SwissAir for JFK to Venice and back from Milan for about $950. The exact tickets are now $760. $%^#$#@&**!

I purchased tickets fri march 7th from tpa to fra 5/6/09/return 6/3/09 under500. 1stop atl on delta.

I am looking at May-July open jaw NYC-Paris Stockholm-SFO for $765.

airfares are based on a variety of different factors, including oil proces, the overall economy etc. since the economy has dropped with the decline still going on, a decreasing demand for air travel is predictable. from that point, dropping air fares would not be wondering to me. on the other hand, airlines will have to make (rather attempt making) profits, so they won't fly passengers for free, so that any fare decline will be limited.

i would keep watching for best deals and book pretty early.

it is my experience that flights going beyond a "standard" destination (i mean those with two legs) may be less expensive and provide a better deal. recently i have checked r/t fares for fra-atl available at around 450euros. flights fra-atl-mia were at around 370euros. you get more and pay less. i could imagine that this works reversely too. just have a look around.

it is also my experience that booking directly with the airline can be significantly more expensive than booking through a portal like expedia.com.

It is never generic, it is always date and destination specific and based on seats unsold.

We are using FF tickets for our April UK trip. I got the tickets back in August when airfare was around $1200 per person.

In November, I again checked April airfare for our friends and it was running around $1000 per person.

Today the same tickets are a little over $500 per person from IAH - MAN for April.

American has lowered it's prices for overseas flights for travel thru early May I believe.

I recently checked AA's fare for IAH - FRA in October and it is around $800 which is about what it was last year.

Two of my friends bought RT tickets a couple of days ago LAX-FCO for next month for about $600 each inclusive. Six months ago we weren't able to find anything under $1,400 each.

<<haven't seen any significant price decreases out of ATL.>>

Ira, did you check last week? My mom just got ATl-FCO/MXP-ATL for $535.

That's for May.

Never mind-- I was reading Europe threads and didn't see the country tag.