Good to know about Miami. We’re going to São Paulo to see our daughter in May and considered connecting there. Wound up going through DFW, which is often impacted by thunderstorms. As Roseanne Roseannadanah told us, it’s always something!
Miami is tough but it’s often the gateway to Latin America.
I’d connect in Charlotte any day and have.
But in the end, you chase cost and convenience (ie shorter duration) and put deal with the rest, whatever it is.
Good luck.
Buying this early out, tickets may be costly. I’d definitely get refundable to your credit card, and keep checking. Thanksgiving is weird, tickets are expensive and then the fares start dropping. Then all of a sudden they jump back up. If you keep checking, you can often get a much better deal, and sometimes better routing also, as they change flights around. Sometimes when I think prices are very good and won’t go lower, that’s when I’ll buy non-refundable, if I’m certain I’m going or know I’d use the credit.
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Curious about “refundable” fares. Do posters mean what is usually the second to bottom level ticket which allows credit if changed (usually for a year after the initial booking), or fully refundable (for any reason)? Do all airlines offer the latter? OR, is this purchased through 3rd party insurance?
Fully refundable to original form of payment is what I was referring to - yes airlines offer this (maybe not all budget airlines but most carriers do), but the tickets are more expensive than those that are refundable for flight credit. Some are more expensive by hundreds of dollars and others (like in this case) are not much more, so it also becomes a case of how much you need the “insurance” and are willing to pay for it.
Actual way they do this might vary by airline. For example, if you look at Southwest, they have 4 different fare tiers and the top 2 (“anytime” and “business select”) include refundable to original form of payment as part of a package what you’re paying for. For AA, they specifically give you a $ value per ticket to add on to make it refundable. You don’t need a reason, but there is some kind of time limit by which you have to cancel (for southwest it seems to be just 10 minutes before the flight ! But others I think are more like 1 day, possibly up to 3 days.
(Btw it really interested us when we moved to the US that “non refundable “ is actually refundable, just in flight credit. Where we came from, if you cancelled a non refundable fare, you got zero back in any form. )
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(Of course, I had to check already and our routing is now $120 more pp than what I paid. I didn’t really believe the “3 seats left at this price” that they said when I booked but apparently that was kind of true. The domestic flights are pretty open but there are a surprising number of seats already not available on the US-Caribbean leg. Do people book this early or are those set aside for package tours?)
I live in Atlanta and my youngest son lives here, his brother lives in California. They are going to Curacao diving either late summer or fall and the round trip Delta air fare from Atlanta direct to Curacao was $$$ and the flight from California on United with a 7 hour stop in Atlanta and connecting to the same flight with his little brother for the rest of the way to Curacao was $150 cheaper total round trip??? How does that happen. Atlanta as an originating flight pays more than the stop over?
When I mentioned above American Airlines locking up the travel service to the Caribbean, I was refering to packaged trips.
Same kind of thing I guess I used to see with BA where a flight to somewhere in Europe with a transit at LHR cost less than that exact same flight to LHR on its own! Saw this a couple of times with different timing and different destinations.