Flight tickets - when to buy?

$1400 seems pretty reasonable to me. From Seattle, I've gotten tickets under $1200, but not in the summer/early fall. I think 70k miles seems just fine as well. Especially for that time of year.

If you are west cost near Canadian border it might be worthwhile to look at flights out of Vancouver. I booked LFT into Milan and out of Rome for 1000 CDN which given the exchange at the moment would be somewhere around 700 US

If you have enough Air France award points why would you even hesitate.
The prices you quoted do not seem out of line for me, you are booking for the most expensive period so probably are not going to drop as the dates get closer or at least not significantly.

Other comment is not sure why you have a negative opinion on the ratings of Turkish Air, other than most all flights going completely out of the way and having multiple hour layovers in Istanbul which is a major reason not to use them for a flight to Italy their service seems to be quite high end compared to their pricing.
Norwegian ratings are also usually pretty good compared to others but their flight schedules can be limiting and you have to upgrade your ticket to get the bags, meal and assigned seats others have with the base fare.
Understand why you would not fly them to Italy but imagine in both cases it should be for convenience rather than their low ratings.

We don't want to fly discount airlines like Turkish or Norwegian with low ratings
No offense, but Turkish Air is great and I don't believe it suffers from low ratings (what low ratings?).
http://www.worldairlineawards.com/awards/world_airline_rating.html
The food is great, the service is great, there is plenty of room even in economy, and the prices are unbeatable. I've flown them multiple times and would not hesitate to do so again. Others have said the same of Norwegian, but I cannot vouch for them as I haven't used them before.

We flew LAX>Rome then Paris>LAX in October and paid about $1,300.00 (Before CC Points awarded) on Air Canada and we booked about 6 months in advance. The only thing with waiting is the seat selection gets very low. LOTS of people will book a three seat section for two people with one in the Isle and one at the window hoping no one will sit between them, making a two seat together situation harder to find. If you find a route you like and the price book it! One less thing to worry about and now you know all your timeframes and can start filling in your itinerary. I also did not choose the cheaper Turkish Airline due to the LONG travel time, I think it was like 30 hours from LAX due to the long layover in Turkey. I did later look at our flights and the price had indeed gone down, but we would not have been able to sit together if I booked at that lower price and all our planes were 100% full.

Thank you for the responses!

mreynolds: We're hesitating because it's so easy to buy tickets at the wrong time and discover they're hundreds cheaper if they were bought a bit closer to the travel dates. "Once bitten, twice shy." Plus we don't have quite enough miles and will have to buy some to cover the the open-jaw trip; waiting might minimize that, or it might make the current seats sell-out.

Letizia: Yes, Turkish generally has MUCH longer flights on that route. Thanks for the warning about getting seats together! Even if waiting for lower prices were successful, we want to sit together for the long flights.

Regarding ratings for Turkish Airlines, Googling "turkish airlines reviews" provides some rough stories:
http://www.airlinequality.com/airline-reviews/turkish-airlines/
http://www.airlineratings.com/passenger-reviews/34/turkish-airlines
Similar for Norwegian.
There are probably low reviews about every airline but for a special trip to Italy, we want to reasonably minimize the risks of canceled flights and uncomfortable 15+ hour trips.

Otherwise, Wow Airlines via Iceland could be cheap & fun with a layover but I'm no travel agent -- scheduling different legs on airlines has seemed tricksy and hasn't saved that much (on "paper").

I sure wish there was a website that recorded historical data for flight prices, even for just the past year or two.

You might give the hopper app a whirl, they use historical data to determine when it's a good time to buy a ticket on a given route. I can't vouch for it personally, but it's worth a look.

If you read ratings and awards you'd see that Turkish consistently wins awards as one of the top airlines along with Singapore, etc. ALL the airlines have tons of mucky stories and complaints about them on line. It's impossible to sift through all the gunk on these airline complaint pages. Friends had their Austrian Airlines flight canceled as they waited at the gate and you don't get much more "reliable" than Austrian. This stuff is everywhere.

Yes, 70K is good. Even if you have to buy a few miles to get your award tickets, you should do it because award tickets are much more flexible than tickets you purchase, unless you pay the huge price for refundable tickets. It's easier to change dates if they are available, redeposit the miles if you decide to change--but watch out because there is a $75 charge to redeposit. It's very easy to fly open jaw with frequent flyer tickets. If you have any trouble getting what you need, you should spring for the $25 to have a rep do it for you on the phone. If AF is flying the A380 from LA, you can pay about $30 for the upper deck two-seat space if you get your tickets early enough.

And you aren't too early. I got May Delta/Air France overseas award tickets last August and September AA overseas award tickets in December.

Rule of thumb: once you get a ticket, don't look back. Your deal's done. Move forward. The price won't go down by hundreds. The pricing is for a plane, not a cruise ship.

Money magazine had an article (Apr 2013) which supposedly 'cracked the code' on when it was most advantageous to purchase airline tickets. It reasoned that for Domestic, non-holiday travel, the sweet spot was exactly 49 days from the departure date. For International flights (more applicable for these boards), their tests showed the magic number was 81 days before departure.

Ha Ha - there is no crystal ball and no perfectly right or wrong time to buy plane tickets. You watch the fares on the routes you want so that you "know" when a good/great/excellent fare is spotted. There is no other way...period.

The problem with the "sweet spot " calculations is that they tell you how many days before the flight you should have bought to have gotten the best price -- but once people get this number in their minds, the playing field changes for future purchases. So ... still anybody's guess.

meaningless precise numbers like 49 days and 81 days imply far more certainty than is warranted. I haven't read the article, but I'd bet they didn't say every flight magically happened to be cheaper those days in advance. It just worked better than any other day, on the data they happened to look at. Which will never occur again.

Do you know who some of the biggest purchasers of supercomputers are? Airlines. They constantly try to wring every dollar they can out of ticket sales. Weather, conventions, travel patterns, the economy, you name it and they try to use it to estimate demand. And it isn't as if the schedules are printed and sealed away for good. They are changing daily, perhaps even hourly, as they use current booking info to try to figure out how to sell the remaining tickets for as much as possible.

Maybe $1400 is at the high end, maybe its the new normal with airlines consolidating as fast as they can. The only certainty is that on the day you fly you can look back and see which day would have been the cheapest for your flights. Which, almost guaranteed, won't be 81 days earlier.

Hey there, John. Slow it down a bit, buddy. I didn't say the report's findings were 'absolute' nor state them with any 'certainty'. As the topic raised had to do with purchase/timing of airline tickets, thought the article might be of interest. Which is precisely why the issue (month/year) containing that report was referenced in my response, in the event Kara or whomever wanted to check on the author's methodology or margin of error. Hope you have a splendid day correcting other peoples attempt at help!

For reference, we're flying LAX-Venice and Rome-LAX home in June. Bought them about 3 weeks ago for $1,110 each through British Air with layovers both ways in London. Most flights I saw hovered around $1,300 unless you looked into the discount airlines like Aeroflot.