Flying UC to SFO in March.. a bit pricey?

I travel to San Francisco once each year for a conference, usually in May and it generally costs about £2600 return in Z if I'm not lucky enough to get upgrade with miles availability.

From 2014, the conference moves to March, and I've been looking for fares for months. Without fail, it's around £3300 return which is out of my budget. Conveniently, BA gives exactly the same price ii)

Are fares just up a lot in general or is March a busier time for the LHR-SFO route? Or am I just trying to buy too early? I usually buy about 90 days in advance but wanted to be more prepared this time

Have you prices up LAX instead and get a cheap internal flight with southwest between the two? I've done that once, saved just shy of £1200 on the virgin fare and paid $89each way for the sw flights. So about 1k - not bad really.

Start your journey in Brussels and it's only £1650 for exactly the same VS flights - better than half price. Crazy.

So is there anything fancy you have to do to see ex-eu fares (dublin and brussels, though pre clearance at dublin sounds like a winner)?

Doh, pre clearance won't happen, cos its invariably a DUB-LHR-SFO job...

[Neil]

So is there anything fancy you have to do to see ex-eu fares (dublin and brussels, though pre clearance at dublin sounds like a winner)?

No, but you have to book through an agent like expedia, you can't book them direct on the VS site. You obviously have to get to the starting point yourself and you need to be careful on your return to ensure your bags are only checked to LHR and not the final destination where you started your trip from.

Hmmn, expedia does the job, and the 1650 quid looks like a solver (to me the fact that I can eurostar rather than fly there would appeal to me personally) seems to answer that question (I didn't ask it, but was checking for 'future reference').


(Edit) that was from Brussels 12/3/2014 to 19/13/2014, but thats a pretty lovely price really, if only you could split the flight over one night, a 6:40 flight is never a good thing for me

Hmmn, nice price to vegas the time I was previously looking at, and given club kind of costs 300-500 quid, virgins really selling the vegas leg at 1100-1300.

Who says these cabins are full?

One way to make sure your bags don't get checked through on the return leg is to book the 'onward' flight from LCY or LGW.

I don't take any checked luggage and I live in the north.. so a hop over from a northern airport to Dublin, Amsterdam, Brussels, etc, first is certainly a possibility! I'll certainly look into some of these options if I can't persuade Virgin to let me upgrade with my miles, thanks

I don't take any checked luggage and I live in the north.. so a hop over from a northern airport to Dublin, Amsterdam, Brussels, etc, first is certainly a possibility! I'll certainly look into some of these options if I can't persuade Virgin to let me upgrade with my miles, thanks

Let us know how you get on, especially if you use Dub, Ams etc y)