when to get airfare
 

I am staying at the kauai Coast Resort in September. I am wondering when the best time is to book airfare. Is the best way to go through a travel agent and book the air and car together? SHould I be booking my flight now? THanks for your help.

We went to Maui last year and got our tickets around March. United Airlines usually does a Hawaii sale some time in the spring. Many of the airlines do packages w/ hotel and car now. AAA offers some great packages.

If you plan to use FF miles for coach seats or especially upgrades for more than one person, I would book the max 331 days in advance. That's what the airline folks do.
M

Thank you. I don't have frequent flyer miles. I will check out AAA. It may be worth a membership. I might wait until March to see if there are any sales. NWA is $889 per person right now.

If I could figure out the best time to book flights to get the best deal, I'd be thrilled. I bought my tickets for a December trip to Hawaii in August. If I had waited until October, I would have saved $125 per ticket. Good luck!

I just went on line yesterday and found flights from Dallas to Hawaii for $470. Of course, I am leaving on 1/21 but I would start checking now. Go right to the airlines websites.

true, you can never be sure, but there are patterns with certain airlines. Like with Hawaiian, the last couple years, tickets for fall travel (last week in August through Nov) go on sale mid summer. Tickets for spring travel have been going on sale about Jan-Feb. It also seems that summer travel to Hawaii just about never goes on sale. We went to Kauai at the end of August 2004 and flights from LAX-HNL were on sale starting at $270, then we just booked the Interisland from HNL and saved a lot of money rather than flying directly to Kauai.

United is running some great deals out of cincy, CVG-HNL for $388 r/t in Sept.

it really is a hit or miss to decide when to book airfares. With hawaii, I haven't seen a big dramatic change in price, just remember, the better schedule flights will be limited and prices for that will go up, u may still be able to have a reduced fare, but the schedule might suck. so if u dont think the price will go any lower, u should just book it now. Flying to Kauai is very expensive, it makes more sense to fly to HNL and buy a roundtrip interisland for $140 on hawaiian air or aloha airlines. if u have FF miles with Continental or United, u can use 10,000 miles for a free roundtrip.