To save a little money you should consder departing on a day other than fri, sat sun.

The days of last minute flights and savings are long over. You should be checking now for airfare.

I’m not all that familar with Jacksonville, but you can often save $$ by flying out of a larger transportation hub like Atlanta or Miami (I.e Miami is the hub for American Airlines)

I think it is still a little early to buy for an August flight, but you should be monitoring fares frequently and be prepared to buy immediately if a good fare shows up.

I wouldn’t compare fares this year to last year. The current high price of oil, which many people believe will continue or get worse with the current instability in the mideast, argues against lowered fares. I just bought tickets to Madrid for a late april flight, and the base price was comparable to last year, but this year a fuel surcharge of over $400 had been added. Ouch!

Kayak.com also lets you set up price alerts, but I would second what cleveland and finn said — if you can, buy now. Chances are flights won’t go down, but they probably will go up.

$1450-$1550 per ticket seems a lot to me for JAX>ROM / PAR>JAX. Have you tried the links and strategies in our new user thread—pinned @top of this forum? Consolidators? Signed up for fare alerts already? Any student, youth, educators traveling?

How flexible with airports and travel dates?

Thanks for all the feedback, I have checked all the links in the beginners guide. As far as travel dates they are set in stone. We are both students and I have found tickets a little cheaper on studentuniverse, but we can only buy 1 ticket at a time. I feel a little leery about this, not being able to do both at the same time. Anybody have any experience with buying one and then turning around and buying another?

I do. Nothing is ever 100% guaranteed until you are booked and confirmed. That’s part of flying. You’ll be fine.

Looks like you could save around $600 by flying from Miami???

I have inlaws who live near Tampa, but when flying abroad they always go to Miami or Atlanta…sometimes it’s even cheaper for them to fly to NYC to catch an overseas flight. Sometimes you have to get a bit creative and be flexible with departure locations.

If you want to get creative… FLL-FRA $898 total each. Condor.com. I think Corsairfly are on MIA-ORY again this summer too. Flight hops within Europe= Skyscanner.com

Riffeyi
I feel your pain.
Our airport is Jax, which is not a hub (and is far north FL). Getting a bargain is not easy with our forgotten little airport.

I am always looking at flights to France in particular and Europe in general. FWIW, I have flown Condor before and everything was fine.

Florida is a big state, Miami is more than 5 hours from Jax.
It’s kind of a pain in the rear end having to get to Ft Lauderdale (IMHO).
Orlando is the only other city we would consider, unless we could get a really cheapo flight to Miami, which does sometimes happen. Ditto for flying to JFK to take a flight from there.
Jetblue is not as cheap as it used to be, though.

My kid’s girlfriend just booked a $464 (one way!) flight from Orlando to Paris on Icelandair for September.
Multi-city (where you stop at Reykjavik) was the only booking method that worked, and was no bargain at all for your dates.

I have found Skyscanner to be very helpful in the past.

Hang tight, something good might come up. The last two times we got a decent deal to Paris, it was on Continental, we also once got a good deal on US Airways. You just never know.

Cil, I think Iceland Express are going to be at Sanford for about a month in March-April. Interesting? http://www.orlandosa…

Thanks for that, Don. I can’t take advantage this spring, but will keep Iceland Express in mind.
Looks like they have some Paris dates for summer 2011, which could perhaps help the OP.

http://www.icelandex…