Fares to Japan

July 12, 2006 6:24 AM

I have a year to plan for a flight to Tokyo from the U.S. west coast or central U.S. (preferably DFW) in Sept or Oct 2007. All the fares I'm pulling up as far out as I can go are $800-1050 roundtrip. Is this as good a deal as I can expect to get?
posted by zek to Travel & Transportation (11 answers total)

Major airlines typically raise fares in the Summer, so when you are pulling up fares from as far out as you can go, make sure you're not looking at Summer fares. October prices would almost surely be lower, so you may need to wait a few months until you can search those and get a more accurate picture.

I've found kayak.com to be a useful free tool in searching flexible date fares.
posted by empyrean at 6:27 AM on July 12, 2006

I haven't been all that impressed with Kayak for international flights.

Basically you need to find the cheapest US flight to Tokyo and find the cheapest way to get there (like JetBlue or Southwest.)
posted by k8t at 6:35 AM on July 12, 2006

In my experience, you can usually do better if you buy your domestic and international leg as a package See what Japan Travel Bureau can do for you. But there's no way they'll give you a quote for a year out.

$800 actually isn't a bad deal for US-Japan, though I think the best I've ever done was $620 or so.
posted by adamrice at 6:51 AM on July 12, 2006

Those are the reasonable/good rates going these days, and have been every time I've done a similar trip (from seoul) or the same trip (tokyo) for the last 4 years.

If you get down around $800, yr doing pretty solid.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 7:15 AM on July 12, 2006

Might I suggest trying out TripStalker. This service allows you to put in your travel dates and it will constantly update the price and notify you if it drops below a price that you enter. If your dates are flexible it may not be hte best thing as you have to specify exact dates. However, it is a great tool to add to your arsenal when searching for low fares.

I would also add that I wouldn't even start serching until December 2006 / January 2007. Even then you won't see a great deal of fluxuation until early spring for a late summer trip.

I think, in fact, that you can't even book on most carriers more than 320 days out or something like that - so I think the fares you are seeing may be for 2006 not 2007.

Best of luck!
posted by JpMaxMan at 7:28 AM on July 12, 2006

You can also try IACE Travel. This search from Seattle to Tokyo shows prices as low as $479.
posted by jimdanger at 8:01 AM on July 12, 2006

There's some websites that track what others have paid for flights in the recent past, or forecast what those flights will cost in the future. See this free, no reg. req'd Wall Street Journal story here

They tout

"FareCompare.com offers historical prices for trips in 77,000 markets in the U.S. and Canada"

"Farecast.com grew out of a University of Washington professor's research into whether air fares were rational, meaning could they be predicted with data-mining computing that looks at historical patterns and recent changes. It's like forecasting the weather."

"Kayak.com now has a feature called Buzz that shows the best prices found by other Kayak users on the most searched destinations over the past 48 hours."

Don't know if any of them cover international flights, though.
posted by Jos Bleau at 8:05 AM on July 12, 2006

I just went to farecompare and checked your route - the prices listed as

"Coach / Economy
Currency: USD
Lowest per-person round-trip fares areshown for departure within each month"

Starting at $811 for July and rise to $892 by October and stay at that rate till May of '07, when they rise to $992.

If this is correct it sounds like $800-1050 is as good a deal as anyone else is getting.
posted by Jos Bleau at 8:20 AM on July 12, 2006

I've consistently found the cheapest USA - Tokyo flights at Gateway LAX. Used them twice, no worries, cheap fares. Also - fly AA - among the cheap fares, they have the most legroom, and power outlets on their seats.
posted by quibx at 8:28 AM on July 12, 2006

I've used IACE-USA twice for flights from Knoxville, Tennessee to Tokyo, in March 2002 and 2003. One was $430, the other around $500. I've seen other amazing deals from them at other times of the year, but March and April seem to be consistently good months. All the good deals I've seen have come from their mailing list.
posted by dmo at 8:59 AM on July 12, 2006

IACE is probably fine (but my only experience with them is buying a JR Railpass). Another consolidator worth consideration is H.I.S. -- I got several quite reasonable LAX-Narita tickets from them for Korean Air (although that was back in the 90s, don't have recent experience).
posted by Rash at 9:41 AM on July 12, 2006