Summer Trans-Atlantic Airfares Have Not Yet Skyrocketed to Unaffordable Levels

A great many alarmists inhabit the world of travel, and when you go to any gathering of avid travelers, you hear exaggerated predictions about the amount of money you'll need to fly the Atlantic round-trip this summer. I've heard people throw around such frightening forecasts as $1,800 round-trip between New York and London.
 
Now it may be that some experts expected the cost of airfares to rise that high, but the worst-case scenarios just haven't happened -- yet. If you'll go to almost any airfare search engine and insert dates for a round-trip flight to London coinciding with peak activity in the Olympics, you'll find it's not difficult to find non-stop, round-trip flights for $1,162 (my own recent test results) between New York and London. Those are the figures I encountered, including all fees, taxes and fuel surcharges, for a hypothetical flight taking off on July 14 (just prior to the start of the Olympics), and coming back on August 4 (in the midst of the Olympics). You can even reduce that figure by about $200 by booking a one-stop flight to London on, say, Icelandair via Reykjavik or Finnair via Helsinki.
 
Now there are isolated dates around this time when airfares spike even higher. There are also flights during any particular day that are priced at higher levels. But without too much difficulty, you can still find an $1,162 round-trip fare.
 
Of course, $1,162 isn't cheap, especially as compared with the prices of earlier years. But it's a figure that you can offset with drastically-reduced housing and meal costs once you're in Europe. As I've pointed out before, the smart tourist is currently opting to rent a European apartment rather than a hotel room, and thus reducing not simply the costs of accommodations but also the cost of meals that can now be prepared in the kitchenettes that come with such apartments. And the least pretentious among tourists is opting to stay in hostels, of which there are an increasing number in every European capital.
 
So take heart. International travel is still available for the person who makes a strong effort to reduce his or her costs once they are in the destination city. And it may be that public resistance to increased airfares has caused the international airlines to delay the sharp rise in prices that they must ardently desire.