Copa Flight Pricing

[poupre]

I'm taking a vacation to Colombia in October. There is a one way Copa flight from LET-CTG that I still need to book. The pricing on it though is killing my budget. It has gone from $157-$212-$253, before taxes over the last month. But even though the price has gone up, it appears from the seat map the flights are empty.

Is anyone familiar enough with Copa's pricing strategy to tell me if I'm patient the price will come back down? Or should I just bite the bullet and book now before it goes up again.

[djjaguar64]

I don't think anyone knows any airlines pricing strategy. I would search on other sites(search engines) and see if lower fares are available for that route on Copa. Other wise I would book the fare. I see tons of availability for a o/w for $64, maybe you need to be flexible and change your dates?

[coolcoil]

I've played the waiting game with COPA a number of times. I usually lose. There have been a couple of times where the price dropped when the flight was a few days away (I assume because it was almost empty), but that does not happen often.

You cannot tell how full the plane is from the seat map because many, if not most, COPA fliers do not select seats until check in.

I use Flightstats to check inventory availability:

http://www.flightstats.com/go/Flight...vailability.do

Just for the fun of it, you might want to check out their round trip pricing. I have found that COPA tends to charge a hefty premium for a one-way. You can always blow off the return.

[poupre]

Thanks for the replies!

I'm unfortunately tied into one possible date, and one possible flight too ! The only other option is LAN and that flight with long layovers eats up a whole precious vacation day.

Thanks Coolcoil for letting me know you haven't had much luck with the waiting game. I didn't know you couldn't select seats, so yeah, the seat map is useless. FlightStats doesn't pull that route that day, probably too insignificant a flight. Copa's roundtrips seem to be the type to only add up each segement, so no luck there.

I'll just go ahead and book, don't want to wait until a few days prior and have the flight sell out, also no guarantee of internet access once I arrive in Colombia.