Deciding on a time frame for booking airline tickets to Europe is always difficult.  It is tempting to book soon after the trip is initially conceived.  Locking down the flight details allows travel planners to start working on the more creative trip details: hotels, connections, and activities.

We have been incredibly lucky with our timing in purchasing tickets for Europe.  Of the 3 flights we have booked in the past three years, 2 were booked at their lowest price for the desired carrier and schedule, and the last is within $50 of its lowest price.  Here are our tips for maximizing your savings:

1. Decide on priorities.  Before researching, decide how important schedule and carrier preferences weigh against ticket cost.  Frequent flyer affiliation, number of stops, and a convenient schedule are important considerations.  We generally limit our search to carriers that are part of Star Alliance (which allows us to earn United Mileage Plus miles) and a maximum of one stop. More stops introduce more risk of missing connections and add to travel time.  If these criteria are not important to you, then you can widen your search.
    
2. Setup price tracking.  If you decided schedule and carrierare important to you, visit yapta.com and add the flights of interest to “My Trips”.  Yapta will create a graph of the price of the flight over time and alert you when the price goes up or down.  This is the only site we’ve found where you can select specific flights (times and airlines) and track the price over time.  If schedule and carrier are not important, you can just track the route you plan on taking on kayak.com or a similar site.  This will give you the lowest price, but may be with an undesirable carrier.  For example, we could have flown to London for $200 less, but we would have flown with Aeroloft through Moscow.  Tracking on kayak.com would just give us the price of the Aeroloft flight, which we we didn’t want in the first place.  Using yapta allowed us to track the flights we actually wanted to take.
    
3. Book refundable hotels.  In many popular destinations, the best hotels fill-up fast.  We’ve found that some of our first choice hotels fill-up before we even plan on buying our flights.  As long as these hotels are refundable, there is no risk in booking hotels before flight reservations are finalized.  If airfares within our budget do not show-up for the dates we have booked, we can cancel our hotel bookings and get a full refund.
    
4. Select a reasonable price target.  Choose a price that fits your budget.  Don’t be too aggressive with your target unless necessitated by your budget.  A target that is too aggressive could mean you wait too long and either don’t take the trip at all or end-up paying more because of a last minute decision to disregard your target.  Use your flight tracking to watch for sales.  If the price starts creeping-up, consider booking immediately and disregarding your original target.  Although there are occasionally last minute sales, don’t count on them.  Expect to book 3 or more months ahead of time to be safe.  For our three flights to Europe in the fall (September or October), flights bottomed-out in the following timeframes:
    
   1. September 2009 (LAX-FRA-VCE, CDG-FRA-LAX on Lufthansa) – Booked in Early May (4 months prior) for $750 per pax
       
   2. September 2012 (LAX-EWR-LIS, MAD-EWR-LAX on Continental) – Booked in Late February (6 months prior) for $1130 per pax
       
   3. November 2012 (LAX-LHR, LHR-LAX on Air New Zealand) – Booked in June (5 months prior) for $995 per pax, bottomed-out late June for $950 per pax

We are already tracking potential flights for next year (with the same dates, but this year), to better understand the possible trends.  It is always difficult to lock-in the lowest price, but we’ve been fairly lucky with the strategy outlines above.