Tell us about the lowest fare you have ever seen advertised by an airline.
 

Recently my Yahoo Fairwatcher sent me a notice of a $114.00 roundtrip fare between Baltimore and Minneapolis. I booked it immediately. I have family in Minnesota and have been watching the fares between these cities for almost twenty years and have never seen a RT airfare so low!

What incredible airfare deals did you take advantage of that were so cheap you could not afford to go?

Since i have been flying for a very long time I remember taking advantage of several excellent fares...NY to Miami $50 each way (and I once got upgraded to First ! ) and in 1986..Peoples Express $99 each way to London (and that included the taxes). My daughter was in London that year..we called it the Parent Express and went over quite often. There were many happy parents on those flights. The great fares now are overshadowed by the high taxes.

Northwest Airlines roundtrip Kansas City to Minneapolis about 5 years ago - $48 including all taxes and fees.

Continental Airlines roundtrip Kansas City to Tampa about 3 years ago - $76 roundtrip including all taxes and fees.

I was a bit nervous on the Tampa return, it had a tight connection in Newark, but when I got to the airport it was over booked and I took a voluntary bump. I got a $250 voucher, flew from the next gate 10 minutes later, had a more comfortable connection in Cleveland and arrived within 20 minutes of the original schedule.

Keith

I think the sale is through today $199 Charlotte to Munich

I can't recall if this was advertised but in 1981 I booked a penny-a-mile trip from Ft. Lauderdale to Eleuthera in the Bahamas as a promotion on a start-up airline.

Western Airlines ("the only way to fly" - right into bankruptcy) offered shuttles between LAX and SFO for $14 for a long time. PSA (fly me, hot pants and all) was, I think, around $20, but offered smiling jets instead of Electras. Guess which one the businessmen used?

Right, now, Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) in Europe is offering numerous round trips at the attractive rate of nothing plus tax. Hard to beat that.

When Southwest first came to California, they had a $44 round trip to Las Vegas...and if you flew it just once, you got a free ticket anywhere in the U.S. They quickly put the other airlines out of business on that route and upped the fare to $200.

United is currently $89 one way from Atlanta to Los Angeles and that's pretty low...amazingly low considering that no round-trip purchase is necessary.

In 1984, Portland OR to Houston TX one way on a red-eye for $49. No meal service and we couldn't check luggage because it was a mail flight. The guy next to us paid $800, and for that, he got a sack lunch and checked his luggage.

We flew to the east coast for a wedding October 2001. Our roundtrip cost (San Jose, CA to Rhode Island) was $118. We were HAPPY campers!

I paid $69 for a one-way from Seattle to Nashville via Cincinnati in July of this year on Delta!

Well, I'm amazed every time I look at the European flights on EasyJet out of the London airports. Flying from London to Majorca, Venice, Barcelona, Berlin, and dozens of other places for as little as 11 pounds (under $20).

Not close to the rock bottom-bargains of some other posters here, but our cheapest - and most impetuous - flight was more than 15 years ago. Sitting at work (ugh), reading the paper, I saw an ad for a then-fairly-new Southwest, which was launching service between Chicago and Houston - $39 (each way, I think). It didn't take more than a moment or two of thought before I picked up the phone and booked a w/e for me, spouse and the (then) two teens.
At dinner that evening, I announced to the assembled family that we were going to Houston for the weekend. "Why???" the teens asked. "Because it's $39," was my reply. Turned out to be a fun time that introduced us to the then undiscovered pleasures of the Texas coast. Spent enough time in Houston for the kids to hit Six Flags and then headed over to Galveston (stayed at the vintage Marriott there, as I recall). It was the kids' first experience with a coast trip and they were sold. We ended up making two more (at least) family spring (not spring break!) getaway visits to the Texas coast.

Easyjet will sometimes run "free" offers, you just pay the tax. So my family in London have a few times flown to Zurich to visit us for about $30 RT-it costs more for my husbands aunt to GET to the airport from Bristol. My schedule is very flexible so when I fly to visit them on Easyjet I typically pay no more than $70 RT. And it helps that they live somewhat near London Luton Airport.

In the '70s, San Juan-NYC, $49 one-way, RedEye!

When Southwest Airlines had their 25th anniversary special we flew from Ohio to Florida for $50.00 round trip.

I went to the University of Arkansas in the early 60s and the student rate between Fayetteville, AR and Dallas was eleven dollars, two dollars cheaper than the bus fare :)

I saw American Airlines advertise a $19 one-way fare between Oklahoma City and Dallas some time during the early 1990s.

$ 1.75 from New York to Paris.

No, wait a minute, that was a taxi in Las Vegas. Never mind.

I paid $51 plus tax for a round-trip ticket between Lexington, Kentucky (LEX) and Boston (BOS) on Continental. I found this on the Dream Map function of Travelocity and couldn't believe it. We booked the trip for ourselves and another trip for some friends. We ended up driving to Maine for the weekend.

Last March, Wichita to Chicago, $80 round-trip on United. For anything out of Wichita, this is an amazing fare. We booked four tickets immediately!