Air reservations. How far in advance?

When in the best time to book airfare for a cruise. Do not fly until Jan09 from Az to San Juan and was wondering if we should book flight as early as possible or wait until a few months before cruise?

After I booked my cruise I just kept checkin on line every day for the best price...when it looked pretty good I booked. I actually paid 138.00 round trip. I thought 69.00 each way was the best I was getting!! I booked in June..my cruise is on 11/10/07. I believe I got my tickets in August.

I know they can only book so far out. I forget the number of days that it is....:rolleyes:

i always like to get my air early. i check the fares every few days on comparison sites for up to a month.

i think you can only book air about 11 months out. but i'm not sure about that. infact i think that some airlines are even 6 months out only, like jetblue

You can book about 330 days in advance. I usually wait a month or so & then start looking. I usually book 7-10 months in advance. Sometimes the price goes up & I am a hero. Other times it goes down and I am a dummy.

The legacy airlines (i.e. United, American, Continental, Northwest, US Airways, & Delta) all book 330 days in advance.

The discounters like Southwest, AirTran, or JetBlue typically open their booking windows about 5-6 months out, but there is no hard or fast rule for them.

I recently found this out on a Jet Blue flight that I booked other than my cruise one....if you book at what you think is the best price you will get....and you keep checkin (like I did) everyday and see that the price went down...they will credit you the difference and honor the lower price.

It happened to me on 4 tickets that I had purchased. Just an FYI

I would start to look at pricing for January 0f 2008 just to get a feel for what the pricing is like. Then when I see the January of 2009 pricing I'll have an idea in my mind what the pricing should be like. I would book sooner rather than earlier. If the costs for oil continue to go up then we should expect to see prices for travel go up along with many other things. Also, as airline union contracts come up this time around there likely we be pressure to increase wages which is another catalyst to increase fares as there is not much more the airlines can do to cut costs until they start deploying newer, more fuel effiicient planes.

Keith