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Thanksgiving airfare to SJU for a holiday week?


happymanitee
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Hi All,

I booked a cruise for Thanksgiving week of 2018 out of San Juan. The cruise is from 11/18-11/25. It was a great price when I booked it, so I had extra room in the budget for airfare.

Well, they just released the flights for that time and the tickets are around $1000/person. We are a Family of 5 so that's over $5000 for airfare! My budget didn't plan for that. I have miles on American, but not even enough for 1 ticket. I have 120k miles, but one ticket is 140k since it is a holiday week.

So, my question for all you frequent fliers is this: do you think the airfare will drop at all? I'm thinking I might wait until Southwest releases their flights, but that might not be until April. If I wait and still can't afford it, it might be harder to find adjoining rooms on a different ship. If you think I'm just out of luck since that is a holiday week, then I'll start looking at alternatives now.

I'm flying from DFW and I'd be willing to pay around $500/person round trip. Do you think that is realist for a holiday week?

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This is so weird - looking at ITA matrix, I'm finding $492.80 on AA for Nov. 17-25, but the same flights are pricing out at over $1000 on aa.com. Maybe you can call and try to book it in economy O, which is what ITA is giving (aa.com is showing G).

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This is so weird - looking at ITA matrix, I'm finding $492.80 on AA for Nov. 17-25, but the same flights are pricing out at over $1000 on aa.com. Maybe you can call and try to book it in economy O, which is what ITA is giving (aa.com is showing G).
I can only get the $492.80 price by switching off the availability checker. If the availability checker is on, then even a single seat will only price at $1,088.80 for those dates, which is consistent with what you and the OP have found.

 

There seem to be a number of UA options in the $700-800 range. More options are available with a bit more flexibility (eg flying out on Friday 16 November, flying back on Monday 26 November).

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Hi All,

 

So, my question for all you frequent fliers is this: do you think the airfare will drop at all?

 

Yes. But whether it's by $10, $100 or $300, who knows?! And.... I also think they will go back up. In other words, they'll likely go up and down, in no predictable manner, many times between now and then. What I do NOT think will happen is that on some magical date the price will suddenly plummet to $500, be available for 5 tickets, and stay at that low price.

 

You can sit back for a while and watch prices and hope to catch a fluctuation in your favor, but given the holiday travel dates, and what I'm guessing may be a reduction in flights given the post-hurricane situation that remains in Puerto Rico (hotels still closed etc.), I'd be prepared to consider plan B, whatever that means to you. (cancel cruise, switch to a cruise out of FL, whatever)

 

One other thing: when you do a search on an airline site for 5 tickets, you may get a quote that is in a higher fare bucket, if the airline isn't making 5 tickets available, at that moment, at the lower fare bucket and instead quotes you the price of the lowest fare bucket in which they are currently making 5 seats available. You might try searching for 2 or 3, and split your family up on 2 different reservations.

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Thanks for all the responses! I had never even heard of ITA matrix. So, I learned about that, but I can't get that lower fare. I called American and they said their lowest fares are the ones listed on their website. I found a website that claimed it could book ITA fares, but the final price was still that $1088 price.

In the end, I've decided to just wait it out. I decided that this is the cruise I really want to take so I don't want to settle for a different date or itinerary. I may have to cancel if I can't get this within my budget, but I'm also going to start saving now to see if I can't increase that budget a little. Plus, after Southwest releases their flights, maybe they will be more affordable. I'll let you know how it turns out! Thanks again for the advice!

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I had never even heard of ITA matrix. So, I learned about that, but I can't get that lower fare. I called American and they said their lowest fares are the ones listed on their website. I found a website that claimed it could book ITA fares, but the final price was still that $1088 price.
That's consistent with what I found. The $492.80 price is the theoretical lowest fare, going by the filed fares. However, you can't buy a fare unless there is inventory in the relevant booking class. And everything that I've seen suggests that the airline has not put any inventory in the relevant booking class, or any of the booking classes in between that would give you a fare lower than the $1,088.80 price.

 

If you want to give yourself the best chance, don't just give up on this. Every couple of days, use ITA to see what's on offer. Start by pricing one seat. If you start to see lower fares, this may be because inventory is being put into the lower booking classes. Then you can expand your exploration to see what is happening. This should not be particularly onerous, as you presumably only have a narrow window so far as your travel dates are concerned.

 

And don't just wait until Southwest opens up. Southwest seems to price according to the market at the time that it opens up for booking, not by some absolute measure of what is a good fare. So if the other airlines' prices are all sky-high then, I would expect Southwest's fares to match that.

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What airport do you fly out of in TX? Does Southwest fly out of there? They are sometimes cheaper with no bag fees. You may have a layover but worth a shot. We fly them all the time out of Baltimore.

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What airport do you fly out of in TX? Does Southwest fly out of there? They are sometimes cheaper with no bag fees. You may have a layover but worth a shot. We fly them all the time out of Baltimore.

 

 

 

Yes- we can fly Southwest. They even have direct flights from Dallas, but they won’t release their flights until April. I’m just going to keep watching all airlines and airports until I approach my final payment date. I prefer DFW or DAL, but I’d be willing to drive to Houston or Oklahoma City if that would save me money.

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

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Hi All,

I booked a cruise for Thanksgiving week of 2018 out of San Juan. The cruise is from 11/18-11/25. It was a great price when I booked it, so I had extra room in the budget for airfare.

Well, they just released the flights for that time and the tickets are around $1000/person. We are a Family of 5 so that's over $5000 for airfare! My budget didn't plan for that. I have miles on American, but not even enough for 1 ticket. I have 120k miles, but one ticket is 140k since it is a holiday week.

So, my question for all you frequent fliers is this: do you think the airfare will drop at all? I'm thinking I might wait until Southwest releases their flights, but that might not be until April. If I wait and still can't afford it, it might be harder to find adjoining rooms on a different ship. If you think I'm just out of luck since that is a holiday week, then I'll start looking at alternatives now.

I'm flying from DFW and I'd be willing to pay around $500/person round trip. Do you think that is realist for a holiday week?

 

This happened to us over Thanksgiving 2017 to San Juan for a cruise. Pricing was in the $1,200 range. We got it for just under $600. Sit back and wait and watch availability. If there is lots of availability, wait, the prices should drop.

 

As a side note, after our next Summit cruise in April, we will no longer fly to San Juan. The airlines have hit us with high pricing, scheduling issues as well as long layovers including overnight. A good cruise price is only one part of the equation.

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American Airlines prices have been really strange. I was able to get a one way price SJU to Vancouver Nov 17th 2018 for $250 USD. The next day the price was over $1000.

Have noticed since yesterday that their prices have dropped again.

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  • 4 weeks later...
No need to read the article. I’m going off of my personal experience. I’ve checked from iPad, phone and desktop to see the difference in prices for the exact same flight.
Then how can you explain why the airline would do something that's against its own interests, and which has not been seen by people who actually know how the system works?

 

Oh wait, I forgot: you have no need of facts. Or of my personal experience, which is that I can make it happen too, but I can see why and it has nothing to do with cookies.

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This is not up for a debate. Have a good day!
Then, as I have said before, others can read what you've posted and what I've posted (and what FlyerTalker has posted), and they can make up their own minds as to who to believe.

 

I suspect that FlyerTalker and I probably each search for air fares a hundred times more often than most CCers. Obviously, I don't know whether this applies to Mslewis1999, but we are posting from lots of personal experience, as well as relaying the research of experts.

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Good for you Mslewis. There are some bullies in this forum that think their word is gospel. They are wrong.

 

And there are those who have decades of experience, millions of miles of actual flying, and who are both willing to share their knowledge and to acknowledge when they are in error. That is, when shown some facts rather than urban legends and "well, it happened to me".

 

Simple fact - the vagaries and complexities of airline pricing systems are completely unlike virtually all retail pricing methods that folks encounter on a daily basis. They are dynamic and governed by complex algorithms - with often speedy changes in inventories and search results. Unless one grasps the dual concepts of yield managment and dynamic inventory allocation, it can seem like the system is "rigged", when actually it's because of hundreds of transactions occurring every minute across a GDS.

 

Try an easy example. Traveler A searches for a ticket. Gets a price of X. Comes back shortly thereafter and finds the price is now Y. OMG - it's the cookie!! Clears cookie and price is X again. Proof positive.

 

Nope. What happened is that after finding price X, the inventory at that price point likely got sold to Traveler B. And maybe even C. So when A looks again, there's no inventory at that price point. But in the time it takes to exit, clear cookies and go back, the systems have determined that we should add more inventory back into bucket X. Or a sale gets cancelled and put back into inventory. But Traveler A only sees the cause and effect of their clearing a cookie and draws the incorrect conclusion.

 

Unless A has access to tools to know actual inventory levels in the various fare buckets, they have no way of knowing that critical part of the pricing equation. Too many people think that airline seats are like boxes of cereal, and the airline has clerks running around changing price tags on all the boxes on the shelf. Nope - what you actually have is that only a certain number of boxes are at price point X, a certain number at Y and a certain number at Z. And the changes in price come from systems adjusting the inventory in each "bucket".

 

But hey....that's way too tough to contemplate and process. Better to have simple rules like "it's the cookies" and "Tuesday night at midnight".

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But hey....that's way too tough to contemplate and process. Better to have simple rules like "it's the cookies" and "Tuesday night at midnight".

 

Maybe if they wear a suit and tell the check-in agent they play squash with Ed Bastian they'll get upgraded too!

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