The Cheap Flights of Fall Are Back
Travelers starved for cheap flights, your season has arrived. End-of-summer airfare discounts are in full swing, with students back in school and more workers back in the office. It’s the latest signal that flight pricing might be returning to normal after the frenzied travel demand of the past two years.
Business travel hasn’t rebounded to the extent that leisure travel has, and airlines need to fill up their planes. Cue the limited-time offers and low fares for flights—for some of the season. Visiting Grandma for Thanksgiving or taking a Christmas trip is still likely to cost a bundle. “The fares that we saw a year ago were just not sustainable,” says Helane Becker, a senior airline analyst at investment bank TD Cowen. “Going into the fall here, we’ve already seen discounting, and we think that will continue.” Low-cost airlines like Norse Atlantic Airways and French Bee are advertising cheap transatlantic flights, but with the summer season ending and international demand set to drop, will their low fare, low-margin approach withstand the winter?
An analysis from travel app Hopper found that the cheapest fares heading into fall are cheaper than before. Fall fares are down 9% from last year and 10% from 2019 prices, Hopper found. Airfares for September and October are 29% lower than the average prices during the peak summer months for domestic routes, says Hayley Berg, lead economist at Hopper. Prices for international flights, including to destinations in Europe, are down by a similar amount.
Discounted plane tickets are typical for autumn. But they have been harder to find in the past few years as travel demand remained high beyond the usual peak periods as people used their ability to work remotely to go on trips outside of the summer months. The discounts this fall might also appear greater because of how expensive summer travel got, Berg says. “With each passing month, things are looking more like they did in 2019,” says Scott Keyes, founder of travel-membership service Going.
Some of the biggest flight deals on the market right now are for trips to popular family vacation destinations such as Orlando, Fla., and Hawaii, Keyes says. (Airlines are also discounting flights to Hawaii as recovery efforts continue after the wildfires in Maui.) The cheaper airfares this fall are making dream trips a reality for some. Ben Croxton, a 39-year-old electrician from Gadsden, Ala., is traveling to New York City in October to attend a fan convention hosted by Dopey, a podcast about substance-abuse recovery.
Croxton says that cheap flights allowed him to attend. Because he saved money, Croxton says he can afford staying at the hotel arranged for attendees. During his time in New York, he plans to visit the Brooklyn Bridge and Katz’s Delicatessen. “To be able to get out and meet up with other people that have had the same experience and the same troubles and have been helped by this podcast so much, it’s indescribably important to me,” Croxton says.
Low-cost carriers are leading the charge in discounts as fall approaches. As of Monday afternoon, budget rivals Spirit Airlines
and Frontier Airlines were marketing multiple flights starting around $20, including for flights from Cleveland to Orlando and from Detroit to Atlanta.(All but the most bare-bones of fliers can expect to pay fees on these trips.)
JetBlue’s recent fall promotion advertised one-way fares as low as $39 for flights from New York to Charleston, S.C., and from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The deals aren’t limited to low-cost airlines, and some are touting deals to international spots. Alaska Airlines had a limited-time sale on winter flights to Mexico and Central America, with one-way fares costing as little as $115.
Cheaper flights to Europe are also on offer. The cheapest round-trip fare to Paris this fall on a full-service airline is $230 for a basic-economy ticket on American Airlines from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, a Going analysis found, down from $392 a year earlier. Fares at that low price are available between September and March, with the exception of the weeks around Christmas and New Years, Keyes says.
These bargains won’t last forever, travel analysts warn. Flight pricing is always volatile, and demand is far from the only factor influencing how much airlines charge. Carriers are still managing shortages of pilots and other critical staff members, Becker says. Airlines face pressure to pay their workers more, as evidenced by a recent deal American Airlines struck with its pilots worth over $9 billion. The cost of fuel also remains a concern. Inflation still weighs on many households, and many people will be forced to tighten their budgets as student-loan repayments resume.
Slower months such as September and October might bring deals, but travelers can expect higher prices during Thanksgiving, Christmas and other holidays. “Prices today for the holidays are still a bit higher than 2019 prices, but they are falling and they’ll bottom out at the end of September, early October,” Berg says. As usual, travelers will have to pay if they wait until November or December to book holiday flights.
With most airlines maintaining their pandemic-era policies of allowing fee-free flight changes, travel analysts stressed the importance of booking early rather than waiting for prices to drop. If fares do go down, travelers can contact their airline and request the difference back in the form of a flight voucher in many cases. “Travelers are starting the planning process far too late, and in many cases missing out on the lowest prices,” Berg says.
