I’d like to visit my family in Orange County, California for Thanksgiving this year, but I may have waited too long to book flights. The least expensive flight from the New York area to Long Beach or Santa Ana, traveling from November 20 to the following weekend, is around $600 for the round trip. LAX is a little less expensive but out of the way for my family.
I’ve looked on Travelation (whose server produces only errors rather than flight information), SideStep, Kayak, Expedia, AAA, and the travel booking websites of various airlines. I think I might have to just bite the bullet and purchase one I’ve found without waiting too much longer.
I could take a risk and wait until the day I want to fly to see if any less expensive seats become available, but I don’t want to leave my family hanging without a definite decision on my part.
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12:02 pm (reply)
If you can take another day off of work, try flying back on the Monday after Thanksgiving. We are flying that day instead of the Sunday and our tickets were much, much cheaper.
The travel agent we go through at work says you should book no later than Labor Day to get the good deals.
12:40 pm (reply)
Have you given http://www.farecast.com a try? It attempts to show you when to buy your ticket, based on whether fares will drop or go up in the next few weeks. It’s a pretty neat concept.
2:47 pm (reply)
I’ve had good luck with ITA Software’s website for fare info. It won’t let you book there, but it’ll point you in the right direction. And you can mess with connections and dates to see how the airfares change.
beta.itasoftware.com
Oh, probably not a factor for the route you are looking at, but they don’t include all airlines (notably Southwest).
5:06 pm (reply)
May not work well for holiday travel, but occasionally I’ve seen folks trying to unload their frequent flier miles on craigslist.
I guess if people know they’re never going to use them they may be just trying to get what they can out of them and I’ve seen some bargains.
Not sure how the logistics of this would work out though, since you’re basically relying on them to “purchase” your ticket with their miles…
6:13 pm (reply)
Have you tried looking at last minute deal sites? the one that comes to mind is lastminutetravel.com
7:35 pm (reply)
If you want to wait until 2 weeks before the trip to book, you could try http://www.site59.com
11:22 pm (reply)
Try JetBlue.
It looks like you can get a roundtrip for under $400 to Long Beach.
Good luck!
9:16 am (reply)
If you want to grab a drink with another pf blogger, send me a comment when you get here!
10:21 am (reply)
Try Travelzoo.com They publish the best 20 fares every week and you can get them by e-mail.
4:06 pm (reply)
Beside the price I would be careful using EXPEDIA. Just search for “EXPEDIA complaints” in Google or Yahoo and you will read horrible stories from people that used EXPEDIA.
Good luck
11:52 am (reply)
I find that over the past year the number of flights has been reduced so much its rediculous. I can rarely find a flight for under $300, when two years ago the same flights were about $150. Also every flight I’ve been on this year has been full.
7:58 pm (reply)
Jet Blue is really the most inexpensive coast to coast. Vary your return date and you could fly as low as $229 round trip.
3:49 pm (reply)
have you tried Trabber? is a quite good search engine that aggregate information in real time. Here is the address: http://www.trabber.com