Christmas airfare?

When is generally the best time to get the best deals for Christmas airfare to the States? Fares at the moment are crazy-high for the Christmas season. I know when booking domestic airfares in the past, Christmas time deals start popping up around late-Sep/early October.
I'm just hoping they won't follow the trend of this year's airfare, which in general have been, well, insane...

I'm curious about this too.. so far my search for flights into Dallas have been pretty high. I flew home last in 2008 and found some really good deals while searching in September.

I booked late October/early november last year and got flights for £350 RT. Leaving Xmas eve and coming back new years eve.

If you can come back NYE, that will usually drop your price.

I think we used travelsupermarket.com to find the price and flew through Delta.

Flights are supposed to be cheapest around 22 days before, but I don't think it works like that for holiday flights!

Word of warning: last year there was some weather that delayed our xmas eve flight and we got re-routed twice and didn't make it to PHL until early morning of Christmas (we were supposed to arrive at 3 the day before). We had been lucky and got the last flight to the States out of Paris, but we were very close to spending the holidays in France.

Last year we booked our flights back in June and we checked out flights the entire time and never found them any lower, just slowly going up the closer it got.

We too got caught up the all of the snow drama and as we were planning on going out several days before Christmas for a few weeks to the US, the good people of Delta were asking people if they would allow themselves to be bumped for two days for compensation as they had people who had been living in the airport for a few days. As we were a family of four we asked what the compensation involved and it was for two days at the Hilton Hotel, with all food paid for at the Hilton and also £500 each per person in compensation and this included our two children as well and also fly via First Class over to the US. We took it since our tickets cost us nowhere near this and it was like flying for free!  And we got to the US on Christmas Eve anyways!

I'm actually looking for the reverse (US to UK) and am finding the airfares to be completely outrageous.   

I'd love to have the same airfare that I was able to get during the same time back in 2001 ($350 RT), but that'll never happen again.   

The thing that gets me is that I know in the states (not sure how the fees are in the UK) the airport fees and taxes can be more than the price of the actual ticket.  How does that make sense?

the last time I checked return fares to New York are running about £450-460. Last year I paid about £320.

Unlike the US, by law in the UK the prices advertised have to include all taxes and airport charges.

If you are flexible check with Icelandic Airlines.

Last year flight prices were quite low, and even at the last minute I got a good deal. I had to fly back for my brother's wedding and wound up paying around £400 for my ticket. I had seen them advertised for about £350 before that.

This year they started off at around £400 and have been slowly creeping up. I couldn't risk waiting anymore, so we wound up paying about £500 per ticket. It doesn't help that I can't travel outside the school holidays at all. (I'm a teacher.)

Good luck on finding a good deal!

BA has a sale on right now...

I found flying on Christmas day can almost halve your cost.  We went to Disney in Orlando in 2005 for our Honeymoon.  Flights in the few days leading up to Xmas were around £800 return, but we flew on Christmas day (no kids, and not being Christian we didn't care that it was Christmas) and the flights were around £450

Unfortunately we'll probably have to suck up the cost or just not go at all. My parents have already bowed out of coming b/c of high prices (they are a bit more shoehorned into specific dates than we are because of their jobs) so the ball is in our court now.

We're flying with our 2 year old and would prefer not to have several connections, plus we need to get to Cleveland, Ohio, so that eliminates a lot of options.

Thanks for the tips, however! I'll keep my eyes open for better fares!