When to buy airfare to Europe for May?
 

I am (I hope) graduating with a Ph.D. in mid-May, and it's my intention to take a 3-4 week trip to Europe afterward -- certainly France, possibly Italy or the Netherlands and Belgium as well. I'd be leaving out of SFO. I've been watching airfares, which are running around $1000 right now. The catch is, while I know my graduation date, there is always that <i>slight</i> possibility that I might not have my dissertation <i>completely</i> finished by the date I have in mind, and it's hard to tell this far in advance how likely that is to be the case. I can't put my trip much later, because presumably I will have an academic job lined up for the fall and I will need to be relocating to wherever I'll be beginning my teaching career.

I know choosing when to buy airfare is always bit of a crapshoot and is supposed to be harder to guess than usual this year, but could those of you who fly to Europe often advise me on when I should expect to have to make the commitment without dooming myself to hideously high airfare? It would be great if I could forego this decision until, say, the beginning of March, when I should have a better idea how the dissertation is coming along. I don't mind paying a couple hundred more not to have to eat the whole thing if I don't finish on time, but I don't want to pay $1800 or something either.

I think you can wait till late Feb. It's not like you're getting very good fare right now either, and a fare for mid-May shouldn't be more than around $1,000 anyways.

But if you want to book now, Continental to Cologne is $790 from San Francisco, including all taxes right now. Short train ride to Amsterdam.

If you have to cut it close, and you're flexible when the time comes, priceline might be an idea, if you can't find last minute fares that work for you.

I've used priceline in the past for trips to the UK and had success.

Good luck, both with graduating and travel!

Somehow I suspect that if you DO buy those tickets that dissertation will magically get completed BEFORE you are due to leave.

Spend less time here and more on the manuscript.

Ditto Dukey.

((I))

I'd wait until I knew what my job offers are -- I don't know what field you're in, but in the humanities and social sciences you start getting word by late February.

This extends beyond travel advice, but if you don't get an offer, it's often better to not defend until the following semester or year -- pay is generally lower as an adjunct vs. a grad student employee, and there are usually no benefits. If you have post-doc's lined up as back-ups, that's a different story.

Right now I am looking at an open jaw SFO-LON PAR-SFO for $850 to $900, leaving May 17 and returning July 10. Interestingly, both Kayak and ITO software listed flights for $740, but when I tried to book them, they were no longer available but were still showing up two days later.

ttt

On 4 Dec, we paid $723. (Delta 767) for open jaw flts: JFK-Barcelona-Rome-JFK in May.
M