Anyone think crowds will be lower this summer due to high gas prices and increased airline ticket prices? The airline tickets I bought 7 weeks ago have gone up by $239.00 a piece as of today. Thank god I bought them earlier or if we have waited we might of had to shorten our trip because of these price increases. Just wondering people's thoughts on this problem that's sure to get worse as summer get's closer.

I hope so....that would be better for those of us planning on going.

Oddly enough, I have ben looking at plane tickets through Air Tran for months and the price hasn't really changed. There are multiple flights to Orlando on my chosen days, but only one non stop flight, and it's still open and only 565 roundtrip for 3 people flying on a Friday and a Saturday. Yay for me!

But, you know it probably won't affect it too much. Gas prices have been getting higher and higher for the past few years and that hasn't slowed any of us down yet.

In the meantime, I'll cross my fingers and hope for shorter lines.

I think it might impact it! My tickets (from the Twin Cities) went from $228 (about what it usually is) to $410! I about passed out! Air Tran was in the $300s, but they're trimming their schedule. Northwest was going to be bought out by Delta (didn't happen, thank goodness). I ended up booking for $309 on NWA. I will miss my beloved Sun Country, but another $100 is too high.

On an aside, my parents were looking at Twin Cities to KY, and the price went from $280 to $560!! YIKES!

The thing is about air travel is that many of the carriers either pre-pay for their fuel or set up contracts with set pricing for x period of time. This protects them somewhat from the drastic changes in fuel prices. However, eventually those contracts have to be renegotiated. And when they are, the revised price will reflect the market volatility.

This is one of the reasons why SWA and other lower-cost airlines used to provide real cheap flights. They had a real long contract with their fuel provider. When oil prices started to rise it impacted later contracts. They had to pass those costs to the customers.

As for the orig. topic... Its a tough call. Last summer we drove because we were able to save big bucks over flying. With this thought, if a family cant afford $1000 in airfare but can afford $400 in fuel, then they will hit the road and maybe take an extra day or two to get there and back. In cases like this, we had more vacation time than money.

For future trips, we are surely going to be saving up for the flights or using miles to fly.

With the dollar so low, I would expect a Disney vacation would be relatively cheap for folks outside the US.

I think you're going to find exactly the opposite. It's more expensive to fly (although I got an incredible deal on AirTran for August just a few weeks ago - $54 each way, non-stop from Baltimore), but the value of the dollar is so low that lots of guests from other countries will be there. We were there in January and last August, and I'd guess that over half of the guests were from other countries.