BillyBleach

I'm finding club world to the US is the same pricing for most routes I am used to. Travelling 6-8 weeks prior, and including a connection and saturday departure. Typically £4-5K.

Raleigh in September, Houston and San Francisco in October - all booked in that range.

KeaneJohn

I suspect a lot of people would have made speculative bookings on certain routes with a near 100% chance of getting cancelled giving them carte Blanche to book prime peak dates at no extra charge so if a flight has pax rebooked on there the cheapest fare buckets will be removed plus the caps will restrict prices even more

Gertjaars

Use your miles or otherwise wait it out.

Majority of those currently flying right now:
1) Boomers squandering their retirement funds for overpriced tickets
2) Families on 'revenge travel' who aren't phased by current airport conditions nor inflated tickets

Jaysonb22

I would be careful with your word choice; "Boomer" in the context you have used it comes across as a pejorative.

danmushman

Wasn't that the intention?

corporate-wage-slave

The good news is that this isn't a sustainable situation for BA or HAL. HAL will be leaving money on the table purely due to their inept handling of this, and BA are in a similar scenario, slightly mitigated by being able to forecast the problem somewhat better than HAL. This is anecdote but I mentioned separately a LYS flight with over 40 untaken seats, and lowest fares north of £500. They probably did sell one of those tickets at that price for someone who really had no choice, but would have sold all of those 40 seats with fares in the £100, £150 range. At some point non LHR airlines will shift capacity to have some of BA's business. It must be highly frustrating. This supply constraint is artificial and will be resolved. It may take until October before we see evidence of this, though.

ferg01

I guess the usual rules apply? I usually take one trip to US west coast in J and prices in April ‘23 are hovering around the norm.

oxtailsoup

Also quite a few of us are sitting on a pile of BA e-vouchers but struggling to find value to spend them at the moment. Don’t they expire sometime in 2023?.. losing track! I really don’t want to be forced into redeeming whilst the flights are so expensive but ultimately may be forced to the longer this situation continues. I’m hoping they at least extend the expiry.

crazyarmadillo

I think sept 23

Greenpen

Also, redemption market very difficult now. That’ll sort itself out too I hope.

OxfordBlue

Great time to burn those Avios!

JonnyA

So I rather speculatively booked a holiday with BA for my wife, two kids and I to Orlando next month, all the way back in September last year.

The Covid situation was still a little uncertain at the time, and the US wasn’t even open to UK passengers, but it struck me that if both situations were to markedly improve demand would surge, with prices following suit. The subsequent staff shortages didn’t even occur to me at the time.

I paid a smidge over £13k for return flights in CW and 18 nights accommodation in a hotel BA list as 5 star with a significant room upgrade. I just looked at the same holiday now, only in a basic room in a 3 star hotel (as ours is no longer available) and it’s over £28k. I expected it to be substantially higher, and I’m sure there are a series of compounding factors at play, but that’s absolutely nuts.

I’d feel smug but for the fear of those kind of prices becoming the norm. I don’t expect things to return to pre-Covid times, but surely these kind of price increases aren’t sustainable long-term.

Nikko5

Likewise ex-DUB. Just booked DUB-JNB/CPT-RTM for January 2023 for £1900 in J.

LHR-JNB/CPT-LHR for the same dates (& same long haul legs) was £3800.

CHCflyer

I know the carriers are holding back on offering discounted fares in J or Y, and therefore seat inventory. They are trying to manage the demand, as well as keeping back a slug of seats for when things 'normalise', which they inevitably will. The US domestic routes are already seeing a softening of demand for Autumn travel, and I am also seeing this in Aus/NZ. I screen scrape fares at work and see a sharp downturn of fares in the next month or so.
The current surge of demand has been pent up but will exhaust itself. The carriers, in true fashion will be out of synch with the market (like how they buy planes), and have plenty of staff, reduced flying and either plenty cheap customers or simply no customers because we can't afford other stuff so the discretionary trips get cut from the family budget. Others will have been put off by the top fare pricing to deter travel and have shifted to Ryan/Wizz/Jet2 etc.

lwildernorva

It's been the case since the first of the year. In March, I could have bought CW from JFK to EDI with a return from INV in August for around $1800 per ticket. Because other items were chewing up funds in the travel budget at that time, I held off, and prices rose. I eventually bought a BA Holidays package for the same dates with two CW tickets going to EDI and back from INV with a rental car for 16 days for about $6100--on the day the US lifted its COVID testing requirements. I figured prices were only going up from there, and I've been proven correct with the same package now selling for over $10K.

Prices will drop as demand evens out and the airlines restaff, but if you're traveling for the remainder of the summer and perhaps into mid-fall, the chances are you will pay a premium.