Flights from Pittsburgh to London

Nobody knows what will happen with airfares, including the airlines. They use computers to adjust the fares multiple times a day. If a flight is filling, the price goes up; if it's not, the price goes down.

Since you have a tour booked, you don't have the option of changing your dates (or not flying at all). Keep monitoring fares, and decide in advance how much "pain" you'll accept to save money. Will you do two stopovers? Will you do a 10 hour layover? When you see a fare you can accept, pounce - it can be gone in an hour. Then, don't look back.

Alas, that's the best you can do.

Perhaps try something like farealert@airfarewatchdog.com (Rick Steves Europe Backdoor 2017 page 101) using PGH as your home base. I just got an email notice (subject: Pittsburgh Flight Deals) about an hour ago citing a PIT-HRW fare at $817.

Though, if you can easily get to east coast cities (for PHL, BWI, EWR, JFK), there will be more options.

On Friday I booked seats on a Delta nonstop PHL-HRW for 2 wks in Aug. I used 60k Delta Skymiles. From PIT it would have been 90k freq flyer miles, plus connecting flights. Fortunately I'll l be in Phillie a couple days earlier for my sister's retirement birthday. Lucky to have the skymiles, but still, 1/4 or more of the seats on the flights I looked at, in early August, were available, much cheaper than from PGH.

Kayak.com can help you compare prices from various airports, not just "nearby" ones, if you can go a bit further (and perhaps do something fun). The airfarewatchdog email notices, or similar, are good, too, so you aren't online checking for yourself everyday, although once you have a flight you might unsubscribe.

Enjoy the RS tour!

Track fares for several weeks/months and take the bait when the price is right for you. If WOW has a good fare now, what's wrong with going with WOW? They have nice, new planes and the prices should be quite competitive. Personally, I don't bite at the first low fare I see unless I am fairly confident I can't do better (for example, if the fare was ~ $600 or so, which I've actually paid flying Turkish Air twice in the past).

Airline ticket pricing systems are designed to maximize profits. Just a fact of life. That said, you must had had a budget in mind for airfare when you signed up and paid a deposit for the tour. Whether or not that budget was realistic, I can't say. However, lots of factors go into the pricing of tickets so it's really hard to predict what prices will do in the future.

My best advise is to pick out tickets that meet your preferences (departure/arrival times, seats, etc.) and purchase them. Airfare tends to not be the most expensive line-item on a European vacation and a hundred (or two) dollar difference tends to be a little trivial when forking over $10K or more for a vacation.

When evaluating airfare costs between carriers, you should also evaluate services provided and any ancillary fees. While a discount carrier may have a really attractive fare, they may also have small luggage allotments, high luggage fees, and the smallest seat and seat-pitch in the industry. Or a carrier might also charge $50 or more to select a pre-assigned seat at the time of booking versus assigning you one (usually a middle seat in the back of the plane at check-in). Just know what you're giving up to get the cheaper fare.

Just remember, the further out you get from London, the more complicated transportation into the city can be. All airports in London are NOT created equal.

I would, however, arrive a day or two (or three or four) before the tour is scheduled to start. This will give you a little wiggle-room in case there are weather or mechanical delays.

Lastly, the airport code for Heathrow is LHR, not HRW. If you want to monitor airfares to ALL of London's airports, the term search LON normally works in airfare search engines.

You may want to consider taking a direct flight out of Dulles. Yes, it's a 4-hour drive from Pitt--and I'd recommend not driving while jet-lagged on the return trip--but honestly, by the time you transfer flights and deal with connections, you'd be eating up 4 hours anyway. Depending on your departure day, I've seen some October directs in the $824 range (United).

I did the RS London tour a few Octobers ago. It's a wonderful time!

Thanks everyone for the good advice. Rachel, we found a very reasonably priced flight out of Dulles. Great suggestion that worked perfectly for us.

Marilyn,
So glad that Dulles will work out for your trip to London! Have a great time!

I was advised by a travel agent that anything under $1,000 is "good." We booked for the end of June back in February with Delta (going out of Philadelphia) and the fare was $835/pp. You may have more flexibility because you are traveling in October. Its sort of a crap shoot and very frustrating. I did think WOW was priced high and their reviews are not favorable. Safe travels!

We booked out of Pittsburgh to London in March (for our July) trip. {We had to use Delta as we wanted to redeem our vouchers from traveling during last summer's Delta computer system meltdown.} We were also able to use some skymiles. Before discounts, we paid around $1100 each. We were finding slightly better prices at that time with other airlines, though. We also saved $100-200 each by flying into London and out of Edinburgh, vs. round trip to/from London (which worked out really well for us, since we wanted to see Scotland!).