When to buy airfare and September vs. October?

Stick with your dates. The weather will likely be quite nice. I would start looking for airline tickets about six months before travel. Book lodging as soon as you can, but know that some places won't open up dates on their online calendars until after the start of the new year. This is esp. true for B&Bs, small hotels and apartments.

Sit back and wait. A year out is too early IMHO to book flights, although I start tracking where prices are going about say 8 months out and I bite only when I see a fare I like. There's really no need to feel pressured to buy a ticket soon when you have an entire year to watch prices and take the bait when you're comfortable. Your late September travel date is practically like October - it seems like you compromised in the middle. I haven't been to Cinque Terre but I do like traveling in late Sept or early-mid October. Your travel timeframe looks fine to me.

My brother and I do a Europe trip every other year in late Sept. We usualy start looking at tickets 6 months out but almost every year the lowest airfares is found in June about three months out. Sometimes it's a little earlier but the June prices is never far off from the lowest price seen in a travel season for a late Sept departure.

We are going again next year and I don't plan on purchasing tickets until June.

DJ

There was a recent extreme drop in airfare prices--temporarily. Keep watch on airfares and if they drop to levels 50% of June, 2016's levels--grab it.
I usually wait until 3 months out unless a special airfare pops up. But again, I'm retired and can go on a day's notice.
I've never paid $1500 for any European airfare, and am hopeful supply and demand will keep the rates a lot more reasonable than that. We've been paying in the $700's recently on Norwegian Air Shuttle round trip.

Hello Frank,
I bought my tickets a couple of weeks ago for May 1st - 19th 2017. I was hoping to pay as close to $1000 each as possible, but figured it would be between $1,000 and $1,200. Last time I went was in 2011 but I remembered that I found the best fares late at night (west coast time). So on a recent Tuesday evening when I looked on Kayak for my dates and saw fares of $760 I jumped on it. That's SEA to NAP with 2 short layovers and VCE to SEA with one short layover. The next morning the price was over $1,300 again. My best advice: Start looking as early as they sell tickets on that date and look late at night. Best of luck to you!

A study by Cheapair released over a year ago showed that for international flights, prices tend to be stable from the start of the sale (usually 11 months prior to the travel date) until about 3 months prior, when they start to climb significantly.
For Europe the best time was on average 276 days prior to the travel date and in any case the difference wasn't remarkable until the last 3 months. If you wait until you are less than 3 months from departure, however, you will pay more. Those are averages however, and occasionally there might be sudden deals or airfare wars that can pop up anytime.

Earlier this month we booked a Chicago/Frankfurt/Rome; Naples/Munich/Chicago for just over $900, and this was roughly 160 days out, for the end of February. We had been looking for a month on Kayak, and the day after I booked, fares jumped to over $1000 and that's where they've stayed since then. Granted, there were cheaper fares out there, but this was specifically the itinerary we wanted, with the airline, connections & layover durations we desired.

Thanks everyone. So I'm getting the idea that I shouldn't worry so much about my preferred hotels being booked and wait until after Jan 1 to book the airfare.

I actually like it a little later in October. Our last trip was Oct 4-18 and the weather was really nice.

I buy my airfare a little earlier than others because I'm more concerned with seats than price. I'll spend a bit more to be semi-guaranteed to get better legroom and such. As soon as I lock in airfare, I start shopping for lodging. We made our airfare and lodging reservations in March for our October trip.

During the October trip (5 nights in Venice, 5 nights in Florence and 4 nights in Rome) we stayed in apartments the entire time. It was the best experience ever and I don't plan to ever go back to hotels!

We bought tickets to Venice for next June in late September. We paid 720 each round trip from SFO. Price currently is about 1500 round-trip per person. When I saw the price drop that low could not pass them up. You just got to keep looking. We weren't even planning to go next summer but could not pass the deal up. What we saved on airfare will almost cover our accomadations for the trip. Very happy travelers. So basically you never know when a good fair is going to pop up. I saw online that if you others got a similar deal. By the way these tickets were bought on British Airways, but the flight is on American. These were purchased on a Wednesday afternoon which I hear is always a great day to buy tickets. Best of luck

I was a bit obsessive finding flights for our family because there are 5 of us and we are traveling over the Easter Holiday in 2017. And, I really wanted an open jaw but we went with RT after seeing the price savings we were offered. Flights RT to Rome from Charlotte, NC are averaging about $1200 a ticket now, but we were able to snag a $700 in August deal by setting up price alerts. I did this through flights.google.com, skyscanner and airfarewatchdog. I honestly believe the flights went down because of the earthquake :-/ That sounds pretty horrible, but it does follow a pattern....

The alerts help but the travel software that is most in depth is http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ Here is how you put an open jaw flight in to the database: http://maphappy.org/2014/05/how-to-book-cheap-open-jaw-tickets/

From there, use that information to contact the airline directly go through your fave TA.

I usually buy my summer ticket by now, but I am watching airfares until mid-October; I probably will buy by then.

The best advice I can give you is, once you buy the tickets, stop looking at the fares.

If you are certain of the hotels you want, you can check availability from time to time before you book. If you are taking train trips where you can nail down a specific date, you can save a lot of money by buying non-refundable tickets up to 120 days ahead. Once your train tickets are bought, you may as well book the hotels. I have found some very good deals on hotels by reserving far in advance (one hotel I like in Orvieto jumped from 80 euro single to over 100 over a two-month period).

I'm with others, later in October is better, cooler temps and fewer crowds. Weather is unpredictable. A few years ago, friends spent a week in Sicily in early Sept with glorious weather, the next week there were heavy rains and massive flooding in parts. I would never book a room in Florence or Rome in October if it didn't have AC.

Sept-Oct is a popular time to travel so you'll want to book hotels perhaps as early as 5-6 months in advance. As long as you are careful when you book to make reservations that can be cancelled without penalty, book as early as you like, you can change them if your itinerary changes. Once you are locked into flights, it's harder to change an itinerary, so I usually have my ground plans blocked out before I buy my flights.