Flights Breaking the Bank

I mentioned this in my December budget update, but I really want to focus on how expensive it can be to fly.

I have two trips (that I know of) coming up, so I booked flights for those.  Unfortunately, one of them is a baby shower in Atlanta and I had little more than a month advance notice.  Since I was booking so late, I ended up scrambling to find a ticket that was relatively cheap.  I prefer to fly out of Philadelphia for two reasons: this is the closest large airport to my house and I can almost always get direct flights anywhere.  For this Atlanta trip it is somehow less expensive for me to fly out of Harrisburg, PA through Philly to Atlanta.  Go figure.

Regardless, I ended up paying a little under $300 for a ticket.  I made the same trip (Philadelphia to Atlanta) about 15 months ago for $170.  Talk about disappointing, but this is one of my closest friends from my sorority so to her baby shower I must go.

The price I got on my flight for my next trip (to Detroit over July 4^th weekend to visit my boyfriend) was AMAZING!  Seriously, I paid $134 including fees for my round trip ticket.  How did I manage this?  Well, I am taking a chance and am flying out of an airport in Wilmington with Frontier Airlines.  This is closer to my office/home and the security check is supposedly much faster than at larger airports.  This all adds up to greater convenience for me.

This doesn’t come with a downside though.  If my Thursday night flight gets canceled, there isn’t a backup.  My next option would be to fly out Sunday, the day I’m expected to return.  Also, if my Sunday return flight gets canceled, I won’t be able to get home until Tuesday!  Talk about a bummer!  Since I’ll be flying this route in the summer I doubt I’ll have any weather problems that would delay a flight more than a few hours and best of all I won’t have to worry about missing my connection!

(For those who wonder why I didn’t try to fly to Atlanta out of Wilmington, it is cheap, like $123 round trip cheap, but Frontier isn’t starting that until April.  Maybe I’ll do that once the baby is born!)

Do you look for low air fare or minimal connections?  How do you determine when/where to fly?