Please sign in to post.

Airfares to London

For a trip from US to London in late October, will fares drop and when might that happen?

Posted by
1265 posts

Jennifer - If I had the answer to this question I'd rule the world. There are some that say to look at fares 6-8 weeks before your travel date. The only thing I can say is look for a fare you are happy with and buy.

Posted by
137 posts

Go to kayak.com and put in your details and a calendar for October should come up with lowest fares seen now. Then sign up for a fare drop alert. Continue to check fares yourself on a regular basis.
We paid $1100 for nonstop Mpls to London in February. My daughter and son in law are flying from Heathrow to Mpls in July and their fares are $1300 - 1400 with the highest fare being nonstop and lower fare having one leg having one stop. We prefer nonstop so are willing to pay the extra cost.

Posted by
5471 posts

Jennifer, On kayak.com, you set up an alert for fares to London on your date of travel. You can set it up so that they send you an email every day with the lowest price found. I usually do this and monitor prices for a while. If I see the price drop significantly, I buy. Some years I see a nice drop and buy. Other years, the price never goes down and I ultimately just buy (usually about 2 months out).

Posted by
2081 posts

hi, here is what i did. you may not like it or do it and the same for others. I just booked the ticket round trip (r/t) at the cost i could get as soon as i knew i was going and had other reservations made. that was about 8 months out last year. then for the next trip (this year in sept) i used that as my basis. what i found out for this year was that im probably going to pay 300 USD more for my trip (r/t) to Amsterdam. I use Amsterdam as my "hub" since i can get direct flights to it from where i live. ITs a 10 hour flight. what i also learned from my trip last year buying a 2 layover flight to Europe was that it was less money (approx 200 USD less than a direct flight r/t) but it cost me 6 extra hours waiting in airport security lines. Now WHEN you go will also make a difference. A coworker made a trip to London via Amsterdam in January of this year and paid 800 USD r/t. for what it worth (fwiw) you can play the "wait n see" game and pay less. but be prepared for the flip side. paying more. If you can go at a moments notice, monitor the fairs or look for specials and use them, but again, you have to go at a moments notice. Happy trails.

Posted by
68 posts

Jennifer, The past several years we have booked our flights from Minneapolis to various points in Europe 6 -7 months in advance. This allows us to plan early with firm dates, and we have not seen prices drop as I check from time to time. Check Icelandair if they fly from your airport, generally lower prices than our domestic airlines. J&D

Posted by
23178 posts

While people are quick to recommend various fare alert systems, it has never worked for us other than to dangle a red flag in front of us about the fares we missed. I think it is useful to give you an idea of what the min fare might be for that route but the ability to grab that fare is low. My experience is that those fare get posted late at night, hits my email with a time stamp of about 3, 4 AM and by the time I log on around 6 or 7 am, the fare is gone. So we try to set a mental fare for what we plan to spend, and, IF, we get close (within a $100 or so) we do it and never look back - just in case it was cheaper and I don't want to know that.