Air Fare

Kind of a guessing game. Some people like to lock in their airfares early, but unless I am using miles I tend not to buy them until 2-3 months before departure, at earliest. Kind of a personal preference. If you are almost completely sure you want to go then and there and you're not so worried about saving a few bucks if the fares go down, book it now.

Fares may go up or down between now and then. Some airline might have a sale. But that may not matter much to you.

At very least, pick your ideal dates and put a fare alert on at a site like Google Flights, so you'll get notified in case of a price drop.

At today's rate most of your carriers are charging about $1300 for a round trip ticket. Have you priced this route in the past? What kind of airfare do you usually see?

There is no "good time". There is watching for a good fare and accepting it or pouncing on it if it's a great fare. Perhaps you should set up a fare alert to track fares if you haven't already done so.

I already purchased for next July 6 but we have specific dates we need to go. We also have multi city tickets. For 2 people we paid 3400 which includes insurance and seat selection, on Luftansa. (NY to Kraków; Warsaw to Zagreb; Zagreb to NY). If we had the flexibility I would shop around more and not be tied into weekends.

It really depends on the flights and what you consider a good price. We scored RT tickets from SFO to Dublin for next summer for $700, including seat selection. Not too shabby.

It can be extremely helpful to monitor fares before pulling the trigger. I also like to set up fare alerts for my travel dates. If you don't do that, you are unlikely to know whether the fare you are looking at on any given day is grotesquely high or a screaming bargain. It's also helpful to give some thought to the trade-off between price and travel time. Is it worth it to you to spend 4 extra hours getting to Italy (on an overnight flight) in order to save $200 per ticket? Only you can decide. It's good to come to a conclusion about that in advance, so if you see a great price at some point, you know whether you're OK with the travel time.

Real world example of what you may see if you monitor fares carefully: I set up a fare alert about a month ago for a one-stop connection from Washington DC to Munich, returning on a non-stop from London. The fare has hovered around $830 for most of the time, but there have been four occasions when the fare spiked to above $1300 and stayed there for 24 to 48 hours before dropping back to around $830. A few days ago the fare dropped to just under $700 for just one day. I would have grabbed that, but I have determined that I do not actually want to fly into Munich, so watching the fare is purely an academic exercise at this point. But just think: Would you want to buy a $1300+ ticket when you could have easily saved $500 per ticket, just by paying attention for a little while?

The other thing to be aware of is that you may find substantial fare variation between the various Italian destinations. From my preferred home airport, Milan and Rome are usually substantially cheaper than Venice, Pisa, Florence, etc. Of course, you must also factor in the extra hassle and cost of taking a train to your desired destination if it is not one of the cheap Italian airports from your area.

Not to get into the particulars of it, but for this last March (Chicago/Frankfurt/Rome; Naples/Munich/Chicago) I watched the fares on Kayak for about 6 weeks starting in November, booking mid-December and saved $400/pp on that itinerary, with Lufthansa on their own website.

What it allowed us to do is upgrade to business class on the way over, and Economy Plus on the return, and not feel too bad about the extra cost. To each his/her own!

Buying an air ticket is like buying a company stock. Hard to tell whether it will go up or down.
Check Kayak now and see. There is also a fare predictor feature that tells you whether to buy or wait.
Cheapair did a study a couple years ago basen on millions of purchases in their database. The cheapest tickets to Europe seems to be appearing at around 9 months prior to travel, but tend to stay pretty flat on average, until about 3 months prior to travel date, when they rise rapidly.
As I said it is hard to predict if they will go up or down, but in my experience (I usually travel to Italy in June or July) 5 or 6 months ahead is a good time to buy. I just bought mine, but last year there was a major sale by Delta I think in January, so it is hard to say.

I'm using justfly.com for the first time. Put in your dates, airports and they send you regular notices about fares - especially if they rise or fall. Of course the lowest fare may have a bad schedule or multiple and long layovers. But at least you get to compare and see automatic updates. I fly from Philadelphia to Rome and then Venice to Philadelphia. This week the low has been $800. The best schedule for me (American Airlines) has been $1100. Last year my preferred flight was $950. A few years ago it was $1800. I figure this works best for me: how much am I willing to pay (including seat upgrades), and how committed am I to a schedule and specific airports. When I'm comfortable I buy and STOP looking! The flight is always the worst part of the trip so I try to forget about it as early as possible. There are so many other wonderful things to plan and dream about!

I start looking at flights as soon as dates become available to book, but I study the prices and I wait to purchase my tickets. The first published fares for a route are not always the best ones.

You may notice that airfare prices change depending on the day of the week and time of day that you search for fares. This happens all the time. If you see a specific care keep going up and up, clear the cookies and cache on your computer before you repeat the search.

After you've researched airfare and decide it's time to buy your ticket, it's almost always better to book your flight directly with the airline you're going to fly. Sign up for the airlines frequent flyer program if you haven't done so already. This should help with things like updates and making future reservations.

Also don't forget that the flight from the US to Italy is probably going to be an overnight flight where you land the next day. On the return trip it's likely to be all on the same very long day of travel. Triple check your dates before you hit the purchase button the airline's website!

We're going on the South of Italy tour in May. I booked Nov 19th at $698 BOS-FCO non-stop on Delta (codeshare with ALITALIA). The same ticket today is $1630.

We have almost always found -- The earlier the better.

I just bought mine for late July. It’s a guessing game but in general you want to watch it for a month or two and buy when it seems low. Mine (into Rome, out of Athens) jumped by $400 for about a week then fell to under $900. I had $1000 budgeted so I bought. It might drop more, but I feel better buying early. I also know that this particular route in summer isn’t super cheap so will be unlikely to drop a whole lot.

What I won’t do is wait until less than 3-4 months out. Then you have no room for error and also are sometimes limited in your seat choices.

I buy my tickets immediately so my wife won't have the chance to cancel our trip for financial reasons or other unexpected problems that may arise. If I buy the tickets I know we're going.

However, I've always found tickets to be the cheapest 2 or 3 months in advance. I bought tickets from Montreal to Florence for May travel a few months ago for $720 USD and they haven't moved much. My guess is they will be available in the low to mid $600s around March. No big deal.