pinniped

January and February are traditionally my favorite months to take long weekends. Calm airports, low season tourist-wise in most places, etc. Usually the airlines load up some nice fares for Jan/Feb to feed my urge to take these trips.

In the past, I've booked about...now...for mid-January. Usually MCI-West Coast for $150-ish or MCI-East Coast for $125-ish. Right now, all I'm seeing is the $230-250 stuff for the West and $200 or so for the East.

Anyone else noticed the lack of good January weekend fares? Anyone else here like me and actually look forward to traveling in this traditional calm period? I'm pretty flexible - willing to take the Saturday morning-Monday night flights - but I'm just not seeing much.

Mileage promotions, OTOH, are looking very solid for this period. Just not seeing fare sales...

Tango

The airlines will do some promo's starting early January--expect AA to bring back their "take your Love to Europe fares" but overall the deals will not be as good as what was offered last winter.

cordelli

I disagree, I think there are lots of good deals out there. SAS is in the middle of their Advent Calendar promption, with prices from New York to many cities in Europe for $279 plus tax, and according to the dream maps at Travelocity I can still go New York to LA for $221.50 total cost round trip on more then a few airlines in January.

so I believe they are there, just not as easy to find as they were before and not from as many cities as before.

CrazyOne

I was looking for BOS-PIT last week, and I couldn't find anything much good for January. Well, the usual was there I guess, around $200-220 or so, but for travel before Jan 6th you could get $135-$150 roughly on some dates. Not sure why that was.

So I'm sure there are plenty of deals out there, but for this particular medium-range domestic I didn't find anything. Judging from the post, I think this is what Pinniped meant. Depends upon the amount of competition on the route too, I'm sure. BOS-PIT doesn't have any low-fare competition.

pinniped

I agree with you on the Europe end of things: I've been seeing MCI-CDG for $306+tax and MCI-LHR for $288+tax on my list of Travelocity fares (I haven't explored airline/dates/restrictions because I don't have time in January for a Europe trip).

CrazyOne's right: I'm looking for medium-range domestic stuff I can do Fri/Sat-Mon. Should I complain about a $230 R/T to SFO with good mileage promotions? Probably not, but the airlines have acclimated me to lower January fares.

tom911

You must have missed SMF-MSP which was out there for $118RT for a while back in November. I booked 4 of them for Friday nights in January at 6,000 base miles each. Haven't seen anything comparable (pricewise) since for domestic travel in 2004.
edited to fix an airport code

[This message has been edited by tom911 (edited Dec 21, 2003).]

pinniped

FWIW, my January Fare Sale email just showed up from Orbitz - all of the AA deals from MCI.

Sadly, all of the fares are exactly the same as what they were before the big "fare sale".

Looks like I will be taking one or two fewer Jan/Feb long weekends this year.

MrAOK

well the good news was it didn't take long to wait. American launched a fare sale today

pinniped

Yes - that's the email I got today. I got one from Orbitz and one from AA directly about an hour later.

Orbitz's email was more useful because they sent me all of the fares for my home airport. AA's was generic to their entire distribution list. Even on the generic list (with a lot of ORD and DFW fares), I didn't see anything all that interesting. Just the usual 21-day-advance leisure fares. ORD-West Coast for $250ish - that sort of thing.

Over the past few years, the airlines have teased us with low fares in off-peak season. This year they are using extensive mileage promotions, hoping we'll pay higher fares. It'll be interesting to see if it works.

If I had a heavy load of business travel in Jan-Mar, I'd be more apt to take some of these leisure trips knowing that everything would be 4x or more in terms of miles. Unfortunately, I won't fly enough to hit those thresholds, so I just see high fares from my end.

rkt10

Remember last year when Delta offered business class to Europe for $1200? Now that's one I'd like to see repeated.

R.

fredmartens

I think that for right now, you have to be a bit of a sleuth to pick up decent airfare deals; they're not always on the "sale fares" page at aa.com.

Using Travelocity's Dream Maps feature, the popular WN cities usually show up as highlighted destinations; if AA is listed as one of the sale airlines, from there I go to aa.com and look...voila, they're usually there as well. Five R/T's I booked for 1st quarter 2004 in the last week (SEA - SAT, IAH, TPA, ORD & BNA, all via DFW) were all $186 - $240 and eligible for the 10% discount (which expires in 2 days) as they WEREN'T listed on the AA fare sales page out of SEA. Not killer, but pretty doggone good fares.

You're in MCI, a popular WN stop, so go look for the cities where they compete head-to-head with AA and I think you'll find some pretty decent fares (as long as WN continues with their nationwide fare sale, I think launched in part to ease the pain for those cattle car flying diehards facing the end of the double credit promo 12/31).

Personally, I think U.S. airline sales will hit the fan for int'l routes within the next 2-3 days depending on how good the BA sale is (that starts tomorrow, 12/30). That said, because there's so much promoting going on over the BA sale (and the fact that they announced it a week ago), it may wind up a bit of a disappointment.

Regarding the "fare sale" that AA launched this morning, IMHO once AA sells a few seats at these inflated "sale" fares and flushes the non-FT reading suckers out, I'm sure they'll drop fares again in about 2-3 weeks. AS does this all the time out here. For now, try the Travlocity angle and see if that doesn't get you what you want.

I find first and 4th quarters are the best for buying MR tickets, as these are traditionally the slowest travel times for airlines. Patience and happy hunting!

RustyC

Yeah, looks kinda slow. ATL to Europe is generally stuck above $300, and I keep hoping for breakdowns on ATL-LAS to the $160 range but the spot sales have been sparse, especially for the airline-selective. Airlines like CO want to see the capacity cuts stick and fares rise as more demand goes after the same number of seats, but as long as there are LCCs with the ability to expand, one must question the wisdom of this strategy in terms of market share.

The bet here is that they'll blink, though in a more limited and short-lived way than before. Don't expect it to develop into such a war that mainstream media outlets carry the news and largely non-traveling folks know about it. Airlines don't want another 1992.

whlinder

Give it a week... the revenue management folks take time off around the holidays too... and it seems like flights are full through the weekend after new years.

Xyzzy

BA has a sale that starts 12/30/2003.

[This message has been edited by xyzzy (edited Dec 30, 2003).]