BLOG: Holiday Airline Prices Up $40

By Jim Donovan: It looks like you'll have to fork over about $40 more for a roundtrip airline ticket this holiday season than you did last year. That's according to airfare expert Rick Seaney who tracked published airfares in and out of the top 50 cities for Thanksgiving week.

Seaney says that the airfares are trending higher in some cases because the airlines have cut back seats. In fact Seaney found that during the Thanksgiving holiday period alone the airlines have dropped more than 600,000 seats! When you do the math that is like having 8,000 less flights in the air.

Seaney found that the airlines that have cut the most capacity are Air Tran, American, Delta, Frontier and United but that Southwest and US Airways have actually added seats (as they are the two largest carriers out of Philadelphia I guess we should consider ourselves lucky).

So how do you snag the lowest airfare around a holiday? Shop early, avoid busiest travel times (like the Sunday after Thanksgiving) and search as many websites as possible for the lowest price. But as always, I suggest you then try to replicate that fare with the airline you want to fly on and then buy the ticket from them. As making reservations with third party sites like Orbitz, Expedia etc. often creates more headaches than it's worth if you have to deal with any changes or flight cancelations.