The Mysteries of Air Fare

I’ve been checking airfare every day for the past month or so. Religiously. All in the effort of finding some plane tickets at Thanksgiving for the fam to go down to Disney. (Although I’m also checking fares at Labor Day now, since I’ll be heading out to Salt Lake City, where I’ve been invited to present at Salt Lake Comic Con. More news on that when I get more information . . .)

Anyway, the brutal truth has been that tickets have only been going up. They were in the $200’s back when I started looking and checking for a baseline price. Now they’re in the $400’s. There’s still plenty of time before I need to buy (5 and a half months is too soon to worry too much), but it’s still kind of depressing to be doing all the legwork and not seeing any light at the end of the tunnel.

Which is why it’s insane that on a lark, I checked ticket prices from Vienna to Boston yesterday to start the process of looking for a ticket for Denisa’s mom to come out to stay for a trip. Plans were getting firmed up, so I had decided to add that trip to my search regimen. Having bought that ticket a number of times before, I had already mentally decided on a “good deal” price, which is $600. A great deal is $500. I was expecting to see the cost be around $700-$800.

It was $430.

Naturally, I bought the tickets.

The crazy thing is that the ticket was that price pretty much across airlines and dates in October. It didn’t even seem like it was especially on sale. (Why did I buy anyway? Because I don’t think it could get any lower. Literally. The cost of the round trip ticket was 16 euros. The rest of it was tax. Barring laws getting passed to reduce those taxes, I can’t imagine that price getting any better.)

And it was less than the prices I’m looking at for Orlando right now. Insane.

So that’s the good news. The bad news is the search continues for those elusive Orlando deals. (And of course, because I’m a glutton for punishment, I tracked down the best European flight I could find. $478 to Zurich for Christmas. So tempting . . .)

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