Airline Ticket Question

curiouser
Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:58:28 +0000

There’s a calendar posted on the Tulane website that lists the Finals Schedule for each semester. Here’s the one for this Fall:
[2009 Fall Final Examination Schedule](Homepage | Tulane University - Office of the University Registrar)

As soon as I had a sense of my kids’ schedules for the semester, I/we tried to determine when their last final might be. This method usually worked pretty well, although some professors changed their finals (typically EARLIER), some didn’t have finals at all, or maybe my kids dropped a class.

Mostly what I learned was not to book the flight home too early. Even if my D or S was finished, there was often much to catch up on before coming home: sleep, finding one’s clothes, cleaning a dorm room for inspection, whatever. I learned not to fly them out until the next day (and never early in the a.m. if possible). Of course, this approach had to be determined with the dorm closing schedule in mind. For example, one semester, D (different school) had her last exam in the morning, and had to be out of her room for the holidays by noon that same day. This was very stressful for her and meant that my strategy of flying her home the next day wouldn’t work.

You are not too early in thinking about this, although from experience it seems that Thanksgiving holiday flights can be much more challenging to book from a scheduling/pricing perspective—more people traveling over a shorter window of time.
I always booked the T-day holiday flights well before the Christmas vacation ones.

Hope this helps!