Are Easter flights *particularly* expensive this year coming?

[queenofthequeefs]

Looking ahead at booking flights for my family to meet up with my sister's family. She lives in Sydney. We live in Manchester.

We either wanted to go over to Australia for two weeks over the kid's school Easter break, or two weeks in Asia and my sister and her family come up to see us there. My sister can only get a week off work over Easter, so we're completely stuck for dates to the most expensive times.

Pre covid, I got us flights out to Oz for £800-900 each at Christmas, with one stop, and with a great airline. Looking now at Easter, it's upwards of £1,500, and if you want 'nice' flights with one stop you're easily looking £2k. Even flights to Vietnam are £1,100+. Last year we paid £700 each for direct flights to the Mauritius at Easter.

Have flight prices shot up massively for the year ahead?

You've left it a bit late if you want to get decent prices for Easter, assuming you mean 2023 rather than 2024.

But yes, prices are higher as there is huge pent-up demand post-Covid and there are less planes flying. Add to that there are lots of people with vouchers that will run out very soon so flights are BUSY.

All flights are now crazy expensive as fuel bills have gone up so follows that it costs flights way more to fuel too which is making is more expensive for the consumer. They're also trying to recoup lack of business during covid

Yeah there's basically no deals to be had any more on long haul. Any discounts merely bring prices down to expensive rather than extortionate.

Haven't done long haul since Covid and can't see myself being tempted for a while.

I used to build a holiday around a cheap long haul flight - haven't seen one for months. We also went to Vietnam for £700 before Covid. Xmas holidays as well, premium economy, direct flight. Can only dream of that now!

Long haul flights for Easter 23 would have gone on sale in late April or early May this year, and the cheapest fares on peak dates would have been snapped up in the first couple of weeks. By now, the affordable seats are long gone.

Also, airlines have been forced to increase fares significantly due to the higher price of oil, and the fact that it is traded in USD, which is currently by far the strongest of all major currencies. This also explains why petrol is £1.70 & diesel £1.90 per litre despite the taxes on fuel being lower now that they were in 2010.

We looked at Asia for Easter 23. Then we hesitated and they went up about £500 each.

We looked around April/May. You have left it late.

With the reduction in Covid restrictions of course they are more in demand now.

Have been tracking prices and not actually seen a massive increase over the last few months - they have just been at a constant high.

I was always told not to book flights as soon as they were released actually.

Yeah 2023 is more expensive than what we knew in 2019. Less planes , the war that has increased the fuel price etc. a friend just bought her flights to Australia (via KL) for august and they already were 1.1k

As other posters have already said, any 'reasonably' priced flights go as soon as flights were released and then prices stay high. More people want to travel (there's 2-3 years of pent-up demand with people who haven't seen their families or had holidays) plus all the people who had flights postponed due to Covid are using those bookings up plus there are less planes in the sky than before Covid (airlines cut back to survive and obviously ramping up flights and staff again takes many months, years even) and in some cases (such as Qatar's A380s) smaller planes due to higher fuel costs/less demand at the time.

On top of that, you want to travel at one of the most popular times of year. You've left it far too late. Maybe you might get lucky nearer the time but that's a risky approach especially as any savings you might make on flights will probably get lost on the higher accommodation costs. On which note, you need to look at accommodation too as that's almost as challenging as finding reasonably priced flights. I'm booked for Australia next Easter (booked the day the flights were released and it was still a bit of a scramble) and one of the places we want to stay was already fully booked a year in advance. I have some other places booked and prices have risen significantly since I booked (luckily we locked the prices in at time of booking).

You snooze you lose in post-Covid world. Hopefully things will settle down in a year or so but no sign of that happening yet.

I’m off to the Caribbean for Easter ‘23 and the economy fare was £1,500+! I thankfully paid with air miles but it has definitely gone up

We want to plan a trip to Oz but can't currently afford it.

You absolutely need to buy early when they're released rather than late - the price just goes up and up and up...

I think long haul is very expensive right now no matter how far you ahead you look (if you need to go in school hols). We're sticking with easyjet again this year and waiting for them to come back down in price (or the dc to leave school!).