Online Travel Booking and Bidding Agencies - First time booking a flight on PL

LAX to HNL for 6/14-7/4 for $573 AI, times 5 tickets.
Been watching this flight since October and it has only gone up. My fault for not buying back then when it was at $600, now the $700 range has been making me ill, so I took a chance on PL, traveling one day earlier than we wanted and I hate that we're not going to earn any miles on this...and I'm going to be pounding my head against the wall if there is an outrageous summer fare sale that's going to be announced in the next month. We're used to the fare of yester-year (sub $400), and the last few times we flew that route were on BA and AA miles.

On United, nonstop and the flight times are actually ones we would have picked for ourselves...I hope we did okay.

Welcome to Ft! Hope you did great.

Seeing as you got a ticket on the flight you wanted for a price substantially less than what other websites were offering, I would say you did just fine.

Welcome to FT:D

Thank you for the warm welcome...been lurking on FT every so often for the last several years, for the wealth of information that is here. :P

I'm used to booking flights out 9+months out...so I have no idea how fares move closer to travel date especially for high season in Hawaii. I am a planner, and have never booked 4 months out, and I was really getting nervous when airfares continued to creep up. Once I saw the $573 fare (actually it was sort of like a counteroffer to travel one day early), I couldn't wait another 2 weeks for fares for a possible sale (what I was reading was that airlines don't really start adjusting fares until 3.5 to 4 months out). I'm going to torture myself and still track the fares the next two weeks to see how we did if we actually waited the 3.5 months out. is there a website that tracks historical airfares and the date at which those fares were found?! rambling now...

Anyway, I was expecting worse case scenarios (for us) bidding on PL, like a very early AM departure/return with a stopover. If we had a choice, we probably wouldn't have chose UA though...we haven't flown UA in a long while...I just remember lots of delayed flights.