Im trying to book tickets to Europe, and a few days ago there were some pretty good prices, but over the last couple of days, they seem to have skyrocketed.

I go back and forth between ITA, Farecompare, and Orbitz. Should I add another site or just keep plugging away? I have 2 different itineraries, both multi-leg (open Jaw?).

Should I be concentrating on one site more than the other?

For an example one itin is NYC-FRA-ATH-NYC and one is NYC-VCE-ATH-NYC.

THe NYC could be BOS or PHL or FLL or others. Im in MEM so thats out of the question!

How would you go about attempting to price this?? I added a FD which helped in some pricing, but I dont know if I should fly into certain cities and then use LCC's???

ANY suggestions

It probably due to summer fares which are pretty outrageous. The main thing I would do is to try to get the cheapest fare across the Atlantic and go from there. LHR or MAD/BCN right now are not too bad, then get a connecting itinerary to ATH. Also if you force the routes and play around with stopover cities you can get a better rate sometimes by doing multicity booking.

I see that BCN is looking like the place to fly... What do mean by "force the routes" and "stopover cities"?? as opposed to multi-city bookings?

Can you give an example of a "forced route"

I am still learning

Thanks so much so far.

Well it isn't FT terminology, but for example I just booked a ticket from TPA-HEL. I wanted to maximize routing with UA so I could have E+ and my double miles etc.

So if I went on united.com or any of the other websites it would tell me codeshares of flights through SAS as being the cheapest. The ticket looked like TPA-IAD-CPH-HEL then return. The price for the dates I wanted came to about $1400.

I figured I would try to do a multi-city booking so I could stay on UA aircraft as long as possible, since they do not fly to HEL. So I did a multi-city booking of TPA-FRA-HEL-FRA-TPA, basically a r/t with the connections I chose.

When I did this, the price of the ticket went down about $400 and also gave be better flight times and more options than with the SAS codeshare that kept popping up.

I'm not too familiar with who flies into ATH, but perhaps flying to BCN would be better? NYC-BCN is cheap at the moment I believe, then maybe a LCC to ATH from there?

Thanks so much ness1216. I think I might have been doing that all along, just not knowing what I was doing!

We have a cruise that leaves Venice and arrives in Athens... I am flexible about flying a LCC and/or taking trains, so I have been using so many combinations, I began to wonder if I was going about it the wrong way, it takes HOURS.

And its the weird 2 different flight itins that is difficult too. My DD has to be in FRA starting for a 2 week stint of volunteering, and the cruise is after that, and I am meeting her in Venice. Im sure its not the most complicated routing for some of these expert FT'ers, and they could have it done in 15 minutes, but I've been working on it for days!

Well, off to the world wide webiverse to check todays prices.....

When is this crusie? I think that's a key point that was left out of the original post.

May 29-June 5

I think after reading some other semi un-related posts, I understand what has happened. Something that was giving me fares hundreds of dollars less just 4-5 days ago is gone.....

So that means the other party needs to fly to Germany in early May.. Like May 8th or so?

Honestly, I think what's happening is you are waiting too late. Airfares tend to go up not down as you get closer. I think at this point, barring a great sale, you are going to start to see the airfares climb. You are less then 60 days out and in my expereince, that's not prime buying time for Europe.

Make sure you give yourself LOTS of time on some of these creative connections. If you miss the LCC flight from BCN, London or whereever it's going to be costly. Plus if the cruise leaves 5/29 I would arrive in Venice no later then 5/28