<p>My daughter will be a college sophomore. Last year, we bought her plane tickets for Thanksgiving around mid-July. Currently, the exact same itinerary is about $150 more than we paid last year. When I view seats, there appears to be plenty of room left. I am wondering if I should just buy the tickets before the fare rises any more, or if there is a chance the fare will drop.</p>
<p>If you fly southwest and the fare drops…you can get a credit for the reduction. </p>
<p>We always made the thanksgiving and Christmas ticket reservations in July or early August.</p>
<p>GeminiMom, I wouldn’t expect it to. Airlines continue to reduce the number of planes they’re flying so that the planes fly fuller. There just aren’t as many seats traveling between cities as there used to be.</p>
<p>Back to playing Airline Poker.</p>
<p>On our routes, fares just dropped last week, then rose again this week. We, too bought for Thanksgiving last July. At that time, fares stayed steady most of July, but you always risk the chance of losing the few discounted seats. It is rare that SW has the lowest prices anymore. Plus for us, SW typically involves several flight changes, which I would avoid whenever possible during winter, or over heavily traveled dates such as Thanksgiving.</p>
<p>This year, SW had fair prices, so we already bought for Thanksgiving and will watch. If some of the competing airlines match (with fewer stops or even better with non-stops), then we’ll bank the SW flights for another time.</p>
<p>Good luck.</p>
<p>I used yapta dot com a few times. You can put a flight you want on watch. Then they email you if the price goes down. I was able to get tickets to fly to Houston a few years back during President day week (which also coincides with a school break) with significant savings. I monitored the price for about 2-3 weeks, then once the price went down to the level that was acceptable to me, I want ahead and booked. I think in my case it was around $150 savings per ticket, which transfers into significant amount for a family of 4.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Southwest is not an option for this daughter. Other daughter flies Southwest for breaks and we have had good luck with them on her route. Thanks for the yapta recommendation, Newstudentmom. I signed up. Not sure if I will get the desired results for Thanksgiving flights, but it could be useful in the future. I’m not sure when the early bird is supposed to be able to catch the worm in regards to Thanksgiving flights!</p>
<p>The fare I was watching dropped 8% this morning so I went ahead and booked. It was $45 less than last week’s fare, but $70 more than last year’s fare. There were still hardly any seats already taken on the planes, but I didn’t want to wind up with a higher fare than last week’s. I will keep tracking the fare on yapta to see if I can spot any trends for future flights.</p>
<p>I was thinking about booking her a round trip flight for moving back to school and coming back home for thanksgiving all in one ticket. Then the next ticket would be back to school for thanksgiving and home for Christmas. I wonder if it makes any difference in price to do it that way.</p>
<p>BarnardMom, I would imagine it would depend on her actual flying days around Thanksgiving. The more costly date in my searches appeared to be the return on December 1.</p>
<p>2016…in the past, my H has found this to be the better cost savings route when booking…</p>
<p>BarnardMom, I have done what you are suggesting on several occasions - usually to get the better fare for staying over a Saturday night. Sometimes it works great but one time we were stung. The problem was we were flying to a regional airport and bad weather hit for the first leg of the first ticket. They closed the airport for 2 days so we had to make different travel arrangements. The airline was willing to refund our ticket but that cancelled out a leg of the second trip and made for a real mess.</p>