<p>I need to send my kid from Seattle to Boston in June - of course the Saturday after school gets out so right when everyone else is likely wanting to go. Prices went down from last week to this weekend ($572 - $532 nonstop). Does someone fly this route or close to it regularly to know what a decent price is for that time of year. I like to get stuff done and move on, but don’t want to overpay and have no frame of reference. He is inflexible on flight time and nonstop so I hate to risk flights booking up. Thanks! 
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<p>Is there a reason why he is inflexible on non-stop? He might find a better price flying Southwest, but there WILL be a stop. If you want non-stop on that route, it’s going to be pricey. Sometimes red eye flights are less expensive as well. Would he consider that?</p>
<p>yep - cause kid is packing a carry on instrument. He has not has flown alone before and once he and it get on the plane it would be risky to have to get back off and on another one - not to mention schlepping through an airport with it - he is not experienced in these things. If for some reason it gets gate checked (heaven forbid) I REALLY wouldn’t want him needing to change planes. On the other end his ride likely doesn’t wan’t to be at the airport at 5am to pick him up and I want him to be fresh and feeling good for his week.</p>
<p>I just have no frame of reference for knowing when I’ve found a decent price. </p>
<p>Alaska (Delta codeshare) and JetBlue fly non-stop this route. In the past, $530 for a RT during busy college students’ travel time was a reasonable deal for a non-stop.</p>
<p>thanks! JetBlue is $526 now nonstop - Alaska is quite a bit more and the flight times aren’t as good</p>
<p>If Alaska looks at all attractive, they do guarantee that if the price goes down for your ticket, you get credits you can use for later flights. It isn’t automatic - you have to search for it on their website, check the prices, and request the credit. Of course it’s only useful if you will be purchasing tickets on Alaska in the future. We booked tickets to Disneyland last summer for three people, and the price went down several times. I ended up with a credit of about $400. That was useful for me, because I have 2 kids going to school in Spokane and Alaska is the easiest airline between Seattle and Spokane. </p>
<p>I would not want to worry about possibly having to check it after hearing horror stories from musician friends.
I would pay to have it shipped special. How large is his instrument?</p>
<p>The first time my D flew by herself, she was 18 & she changed planes in Dubai, to go to Chennai.
Kids are really pretty capable.</p>
<p>My general experience is that you’ll get a better price if you wait and book around 6-8 weeks ahead of the time you plan to fly. For example,looking at the one-way cost for nonstop on Jet Blue for on Saturday for each month (via Kayak): April 26: $190; May 17: $152; June 21: $286. The exception to that rule is for booking around major holidays – Thanksgiving, Xmas, Easter. So I’d recommend waiting until April to book for June. </p>
<p>Also keep in mind that a “stop” does not necessarily entail changing planes – if the plane lands and takes off again with the need for continuing passengers to disembark, it wouldn’t have any impact on luggage. </p>
<p>thanks for the tips!</p>
<p>I like to keep an eye on fares and book if I see that they are heading up. I need two seats HNL to SAN to SFO. Was watching the fares and they were stable. One weekend, they rose about $100 apiece. I called travel agent and he was able to get me pre-hiked fares instead of the higher rates for the dates I wanted. It was about 3 months prior to our trip. </p>
<p>Booked another 7 seats for a trip we are taking in June because agent told us that one leg of the trip was on sale and the sale could end any time. That was booked four months out. </p>
<p>We have another trip coming up in September that we booked one portion of because there was one flight that 3 of us wanted, to fly with friends and seats were selling fast. Haven’t booked the other portion of the flight as the fares are still about $1k, which isn’t great and we have some flexibility. </p>
<p>Personally, I haven’t found any great pattern as to when to purchase my tickets, and tend to consult our travel agent and check itasoftware.com to watch the fares and see if it is stable, dropping or rising. It seems like a gamble and luck has a lot to do with it. </p>
<p>April and May are dead zones for college air travel, so I would not compare those prices to June prices. I personally would not wait until 6 weeks before the travel date to book my tickets. You are looking at limited supply - just 2 flights that match your options (OK, 4 if you include the red eye). In my experience with buying these tickets (mostly Alaska) that prices only creep up the close it gets to the departure date unless a competitor starts a fair war (not likely in these times of air routes cuts). Take a look at the seat map and see how many have been already sold. If it 1/3 or more - highly unlikely that you see a price cut.</p>
<p>Actually, mid-May is the end of the semester and graduation time for many colleges – far from a “dead zone”. </p>
<p>June is summer vacation travel time for many – sometimes fares go up, but it’s also fairly common for airlines to start promoting their “special” fares at about 60 days out. If I can see a $152 airfare to Boston for mid-May, I wouldn’t book a flight for June at $286 – too big of a differential. I’d expect to see that June fare come down on a major air corridor. If it were $150 vs. $190 I might have a different opinion.</p>
<p>There are no guarantees in this – but I’m a west coaster with one kid or another living on the east coast for more than a dozen years, so I have a pretty good sense of the overall patterns. The airlines generally follow a pattern of raising their prices as flights fill up, but they don’t begin to offer the deep discounts too far out. You can often discern a pattern by going to to specific airline’s web site and scrolling through their air fare calendar, if they have some sort of scrollable calendar (where you can see fares for each day of the month set up and then scroll out to future months).</p>
<p>“Actually, mid-May is the end of the semester and graduation time for many colleges – far from a “dead zone”.”</p>
<p>Not in SEA - I live in the area. UW and others get out early to mid-June. We are on Q system. The ticket is SEA - BOS, not the other way around. OP is looking at 2 flights only. What happens to other fares is irrelevant to OP. </p>
<p>Schools on quarters do not typically end until June. And the prices reflect that. </p>
<p>Thumper, right, UW undergrad Spring Q ends June 17 this year, and commencement is on June 14. The other colleges in the area stick to a similar schedule. Something to keep in mind.</p>
<p>
I’m very familiar with the UW schedule – my son is a grad student at UW. I don’t think that the student traffic is high enough to impact air fares, especially to the east coast. </p>
<p>I see it more likely being influenced the other way around, because Boston has so many colleges and such a high student population, with private colleges that draw their student body from all over the country. So students probably make up a fairly large proportion of air travelers in and out of Boston. Seattle, not so much – yes the quarter ends in June, but there are probably only a very small number of UW students who will then be flying to east coast destinations as compared to the overall number of travelers – given that 87% of the student body is in-state… Probably much smaller than the number of SEA-TAC residents who go off to attend east coast colleges in the fall. </p>
<p>If you look at Alaska’s “low fare schedule”, prices jump on June 14 and do not go down to the pre-June 14 levels. The reason is not because many from BOS attend school in SEA, but because many local students chose to go on family vacations, travel to east coast internships when the school ends in June. In 4+ years of buying tickets for my Alaska MVP kiddo I have never seen Alaska dropping their prices in April-May for those June non-stop flights. However, past is not really predicative of the future. Maybe OP can knock $50 off the price by waiting, but in my experience, the probability of that is low if the travel is to happen after June 14.</p>
<p>If it were a student travel thing, you would see a fall off the following week – maybe a bump again around July 4, and then back to “normal” levels. It could be a summer travel thing – that is, more people vacation in summer months overall, including students – but that is related to school schedules in general, not a particular university. And again, the counter-balance to that is that a lot of airlines announce summer sales and special fares later in the spring.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that you can’t just focus on one airline. I have no clue as to what Alaska Airlines pricing patterns might be, because I rarely fly Alaska. When I do it is usually because they seem to offer better deals for late bookings than many of the others – that is, if I am booking a flight a week out, it seems that I’m more likely to find a good offer on Alaska than on the others. </p>
<p>In any case, it’s not worth debating. The OP asked for advice. If I were the OP I’d hold off, check air fares regularly, and probably buy the ticket in April. No guarantees, but that’s my experience. I never buy domestic flights more than 8 weeks out except for holiday season. Alaska is a good airline and sometimes has excellent fares, but is not always the most competitive. So I’d sit back and watch fare patterns before paying the prices that OP is looking at. The only exception for me is when I book Southwest, because with SW you can always change flights and bank a lower fare. But Southwest doesn’t offer nonstop flights from SEA to BOS, so not an option for OP.</p>
<p>Kid needs to leave Seatttle Saturday the 21st - the day after school gets out here so it could be prime time for people to get out of town</p>
<p>Right now Jet Blue is not only less expensive than Alaska but has a free bag which saves another $20 each way. I do appreciate all the advice and input on how prices fluctuate in people’s experience. Unfortunately for this we are locked into likely the busiest travel day from here due to school getting out, nonstop and no red-eye. I am just trying to do the best I can (or close) within those parameters. I would pay an extra $50 for booking now and moving on mentally, but I don’t want to pay an extra $200 I will check seating charts to see how full the desired flights are and go from there. Thanks, all! :D</p>