Airfare will get much cheaper this fall, says study

(AP File Photo)

Grab your leaf-peeping and beach bucket lists: Flights are going to get cheaper this fall, according to a study from airfare prediction app Hopper.

Hopper’s chief data scientist, Patrick Surry, predicts that in the next few months the price for a domestic round-trip ticket will drop by as much as 8.2 percent, to a seasonal low of $213 per ticket in October.

That’s $1 above the same period last year, but 16 percent lower than average airfare in the fall of 2014. (These are the average prices for tickets purchased in those months, not necessarily for travel in the same month.)

That follows the 6.6 percent decline in price for domestic round-trip fares that travelers saw in July. Though fuel costs bumped up slightly earlier this year, they’ve been going down again.

“Airlines might still have room to discount based on fuel cost savings,” Surry said in a blog post.

Prices are expected to fall throughout the, er, fall—and to continue to slide into the winter months, even though the holidays are typically one of the busiest travel seasons. Surry predicts that prices will bottom out at an average of $210 per ticket next January.

If you’re looking to buy airfare sooner, Hopper also lists the top 10 destinations that it projects will have the most savings in August, with Dallas, Austin, D.C., Chicago, and Miami seeing the biggest discounts. International destinations that are expected drop in price include Grenada, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Rio de Janiero, and Tokyo.

In case you’re curious about how Hopper predicts prices, its Consumer Airfare Index uses search data from its users for every destination city in the U.S. to provide a real-time estimate of airfares. The predictions reflect the cost at the time of purchase, not the travel month. For example, the $217 price in July represents the average cost of all domestic tickets that were purchased that month and could be for travel at any time throughout the year.

Christopher Tkaczyk is the Senior News Editor at Travel + Leisure. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @ctkaczyk.