London airfare: How to find deals for September

Back in March, I wrote about deals to London in early summer and how cheap it was to fly there in the early days of June. If you didn’t get to London, no problem. Many end-of-summer prices — for travel in September — are even cheaper. From most cities, anyway. Let’s compare June and September fares — the latter were found late last week with a simple deal-finding tool.

From Chicago:

Early June: $556
September: $360

From Dallas:

Early June: $792
September: $490

From Fort Lauderdale:

Early June: $668
September: $565

From Los Angeles:

Early June: $492
September: $481

From New York:

Early June: $478
September: $440

From San Francisco:

Early June: $480
September: $471

From Seattle:

Early June: $470
September: $592

More: 11 new air routes that promise cheap flights in 2018

Only the flight from Seattle is more expensive in September than June (by more than $100) but compare that to the Dallas-London tickets which drop in September by more than $300. Can you come up with a London deal? Yes, especially if the following applies:

• Competitive airport: Deals to London are usually found on flights from airports with lots of trans-Atlantic competition, including discount carriers like Icelandair, Norwegian, WOW, Finnair and many others. This does not mean older airlines don’t have deals, because they do. For example, the cheap September deal from Fort Lauderdale to London was offered by Finnair but American Airlines’ price was literally only a couple of dollars more. Discount carriers tend to lower all prices of all competitors.

• Lower expectations: Some of the deals above are non-stop flights — Seattle-London, for one — but some deals are on connecting flights and there may be a fairly long airport layover. Only you can say if this inconvenience is worth the savings on a trip to London.

FareCompare CEO Rick Seaney is an airline industry insider and top media air travel resource. Follow Rick (@rickseaney) and never overpay for airfare again.