It’s hard to say. In a “normal” year, I would say book ASAP. In my experience flights have only gone up and the last second deals never seem to materialize. Trips beginning before June 15th will almost always grant a price break, and travel in July and August is without exception the busiest.

That said, this year MIGHT be different. Last Summer, fuel surcharges were sky-high (so to speak) and led to high ticket prices. In addition, a terrible exchange rate (about 1.6 USD to 1.0 Euro) made Europe travel VERY expensive. Probably as a result of these factors, I saw very few Americans in my personal travels between Denmark, Germany, Austria, and Italy. This year, the economic issues might cause a lot of people to stay home, but we just don’t know at this point. I did a quick Orbitz search and see flights leaving on July 1 for $833. I think this is a fantastic deal for flying in peak season from a non-hub airport. I personally would jump on it right away. One (sometimes unreliable) way to guess about the direction of airfares is to look at the available seats on the aircraft. Looking as a part of the quick search above shows that there are virtually no seats left.

Best wishes.

What are your amazing deals?

Looking at the seat map is quite unreliable, as airlines differ as to how they assign seats. Sometimes they block out the seat map because they don’t want to assign certain seats, or they don’t want to assign seats at all. They often keep blocks of seats for families who check in at the gate, but in the meantime, for months beforehand, the seat map can look full.

I second oldlady – post your amazing deals.

But given it is almost mid-May and you are leaving July 1, I wouldn’t hold out too much hope of deals getting better.

What kind of prices have you been finding? How does $733-$775 on United sound? This is from Knoxville to Paris and returning to Knoxville from Munich, saving you the hassle and expense of backtracking to Paris. The dates I used were 6/30 or 7/1 outbound and 7/25,7/26, & 7/27 returning. I used Kayak’s multi-city search.

I was looking at STA’s Europe RSS feeds
http://www.statravel…

I used the ITA and found a 875$ and booked it yesterday. Unfortunately it was before that $775 flight you posted, but oh well!

I should have been a little more specific in my post. I agree that the seat map idea is unreliable as I stated it as far as when seat are about to sell out. I typically will use it more as a tool when I see that the plane is virtually empty. In that case I will often wait to see what prices develop. Certainly not the best way to gauge things, but just another tool in the box that has worked for me a couple times (admittedly only domestically so far).