Best time to book flight to Alaska

We will be traveling from Sacramento to Anchorage June, 2018 and from Vancouver back to Sacramento in July. When is the best time to book these flights? Does Air Alaska ever have sales?

There is no "best" time to buy...you just have to do your research, decide when the price is acceptable to you, book it, and don't look back. This is discussed here almost daily.

 

If I were you, I would be looking at the current prices in the general window you will be traveling. Then start looking at next year's prices as they are released. I would not buy within the first 2 or 3 weeks of the release of the airfares for the time you are interested in. After that, I would do as I describe in the first paragraph.

there are some travel websites out there where you can sign up for price alerts. most of the big name travel sites do this. I normally book 350 days out. The closer you get to departure day the prices start inching up. Also when the flight you are looking at starts to fill up and all flights to and from Alaska during the summer will fill up;; the price will go up big time once those flights start selling out

It's worth noting that the farther out you book, the higher the chance for equipment and/or flight time changes as they refine their schedules. Still worth it if the price is right, just be sure to keep an eye out for changes. Drastic changes in flight times will usually allow you to rebook without penalty.

We will be traveling from Sacramento to Anchorage June, 2018 and from Vancouver back to Sacramento in July. When is the best time to book these flights? Does Air Alaska ever have sales?

It's Alaska Airlines and yes, they do have sales, but usually for travel outside the peak summer tourism season.

 

You might want to investigate getting an Alaska Airlines-branded Visa card (B of A). Not only do you get a bunch of Alaska FF miles at signup (currently 30,000, enough for a round trip ticket) but you also get an annual $99 ($121 after taxes) companion certificate - one passenger pays the going price, the other $121 - on any Alaska-operated itinerary, one way, round trip, or open-jaw like SMF-ANC//YVR-SMF. For two or more people traveling, it can be a serious discount. (Also good on flights to the east coast, Hawaii, Mexico, Cuba, etc.) Alaska now owns Virgin America, so their route system is a lot bigger than it used to be.

Generally, there would be no reason for Alaska to have a sale at the peak of summer travel.

I normally book 350 days out.

How is this possible? Most carriers don't open up their schedule for booking until ~330 days out.

When is the best time to book these flights?

The answer is almost always: when it's cheap. Your task is to work out in advance what is a cheap price, so that when you see a cheap price you can pounce on it instantly without having to do all the work at that time.

There is no magic number of days out that is always the best time to book, and while some airlines do have sales, it is usually not known ahead of time exactly when they will be, and the "sales" are not for every route and every travel date; usually they are for drumming up business on less popular dates/routes. Travel articles pop up from time to time and purport to tell you when to find the lowest price, but they are usually based on manipulated statistics that aren't a reliable indicator. Plus, if there was a magic formula that said exactly when to buy, everyone would wait and buy on that day, the airlines would see that sales jump then, and would start adjusting prices upward on that day due to the increased demand.

 

Airlines use complicated algorithms to determine what inventory to release and when, based on a myriad of factors. Trying to outguess them is usually an exercise in futility.