BUF-SAN route Jun 18-23 (roughly)
 

I need to fly BUF-SAN around June 18 to 23 (could leave Sat or Sun on way out but prefer Sat) and coming home Fri or Sat.

Cheapest fares are around $400 total that I see now, and worse fares on preferred NW. Is anyone here familiar with this route enough to know if I should wait (I assume I should wait a little). Usually we wait till last minute, and get a better fare than this!

I don't know if it's going to get any cheaper. A few weeks ago I steered some friends to a BTV-SAN RT on DL June 22-25 for $243. That same itin is about $500 now. It just seems as if there's a lot of advance buying going on this year, snapping up the lower fare classes early.

Have you tried farecast - www.farecast.com? I don't know if they've added BUF, but they've been pretty good for me in the past in terms of predicting the direction of the prices.

I'm seeing this on other carriers as well. A lady I work with suggested (the usual) LCCs for cheap round-trips within Europe. Great idea, except none of them seem even capable of booking multi-segment itineraries, so if one has to go Edinburgh to Rome and back, one has to manually book two separate itineraries, one from Edinburgh to an intermediate hub, and one from that hub to Rome, and then the connection times are either 15 minutes or 5 hours. And when all's said and done, the fare is at best 75 cents less than what NWA.com wants for a single KLM itinerary with better connections and better departure times... :confused: There was one carrier that looked promising... as long as I didn't mind waiting 'til June to fly to that March conference. Sold out across the board in March. :)

It seems like all NW (and most other airlines for that matter) current fares are loaded through May 10th for the travel before summer. After summer the low fares raise signifigantly... That means that a "K" fare (the cheapest fare class on NW) will be (say) $104+ on LAS-BUF till May 10th and then the same K fare will be $220+ after May 10th - so it is not a matter of the cheap fare buckets being taken up this early - as much as the lower fares aren't loaded for the summer yet.

Hmmm... Does summer start earlier than it did 5 years ago when I was working in travel? It used to be 15 June... I guess 10 May could be the start of a "shoulder" period or something...

I've been seing a lot of high fares for the Spring. I've been looking at flights from CVG/DAY/CMH to several destinations (SFO, DCA, LAX) with pretty flexible dates from late March to mid April. I keep getting very high prices. I don't understand what the deal is.

May 10 is around when a lot of colleges start getting out, and so that kind of gets the summer "season" underway.

I'd use the farecast.com and kayak.com types to check the trends. I'd wait a month or so, and then look how things are going.

I've noticed that the lower buckets are being snatched up too. Looks like another summer of packed coach cabins for (some of) us! It was reported today that higher consumer spending raised the US economy's 4th quarter growth to 3.5%. Which translates into more tickets being bought too.