Today, we went ahead and purchased our one-way return airfare from Anchorage to Columbia. We had been monitoring the pricing on Google Flights, hoping that the fares would go down as low as the $277 per person fares we had seen for most Saturdays in June.
However, most of the fares for July have settled in at $357 per per person as the lowest priced fare for almost every day of the month so far, except for a couple of Wednesdays and Thursdays that remained at $277, which was not going to do us any good.
Although the lowest fare was $357 on Google Flights for our July 15 return date, the actual flight we wanted was $407 per person, which was what we paid today for our tickets. At least the pricing was exactly the same for either a round trip for the dates and flights we needed, or for the two one-way tickets we purchased, so there was no penalty for breaking the flights into the separate one-way tickets. This kept up from having to cancel our original one-way flight out to Anchorage, and re-purchase the tickets as round trip.
We purchased the return flights on the American Airlines website, and it indicated that there were only two tickets left at the $407 price. Not sure if this is a real indication, or a marketing ploy to make you feel the need to go ahead and purchase the flights. I may go back in and see if the same fare is still available later today. We made the purchase on our new AAdvantage Citi Card that we just received on Friday, so that should give us both the one free checked bag benefit.
So, the flights are set, and our seats are selected. If the pricing goes down substantially, we always have the option to cancel and re-purchase, but that need to be a significant reduction to make it worthwhile. There is the potential to loose our current seats if we cancel and that might end up being an issue if the seat selections limited at the tie we rebook to get the lower fare. Also, the savings is only a credit goof for a year on another American Airlines flight, and right now, we don’t have anything we are looking at where we might fly on American Airlines. But who knows if that will change, at least we have the possibility to do something later without any financial penalty.
Although these flights were booked through American Airlines, the segments from Seattle to Anchorage and Anchorage to Seattle are on Alaska Airlines. It is a little strange that these two airline’s systems are not connected, at least not for seat selection, se we had to go to the Alaska Airlines website and choose our seats using out Alaska Airlines Booking Number for both of our flights. However, now that the seats are selected, they show up on the American Airlines itinerary, go figure.
With the airfare purchased, we can now begin to look into planning for any specific activities we want to do in the places we are visiting.