How can I avoid sky-high airfares on half-term Switzerland ski trip?

Have a question? Ask our expert Simon Calder

Holidaymakers can end up paying 10 times more than the off-season rate (cdbrphotography)

Q This year’s skiing flights at February half-term were expensive so I thought I’d try to book earlier for next year. But for Saturday flights over half-term (15-22 February 2020), Swiss International Air Lines is already charging £1,161 for a Heathrow-Zurich return. If you go during a non-half-term period (for example two weeks earlier) the fare is £125 return. If you look at seat availability, the planes are still nearly empty, so this is not a case of the cheap seats having already gone. British Airways appears to be doing the same.

Has there ever been any successful challenge to any airline applying such obvious profiteering – deliberately planning to charge 10 times more – over school holidays?

Alan K

A As far as I know, there has never been a legal challenge to the way that fares increase during the school holidays, and even if there were, I imagine it would fail.

For most of the winter, many airlines lose money, but they make it up during Christmas and New Year, and over the February half-term. Carriers such as Swiss and British Airways know they will be able to fill every seat on their services between the UK and Zurich (as well as Geneva) on the “ski Saturdays” at either end of half-term. The only question is: how much can they extract from families? Those fares you found will certainly come down a bit, but I don’t know when or by how much. So instead I would ignore them and book something rather different.

Basel is largely a business destination and a long way from the best ski resorts. But it has excellent rail links. When I saw sky-high fares to Zurich one February half-term, I simply booked the family from Heathrow to Basel on the Friday evening when the children broke up. Even after paying for a night at a Basel hotel and the glorious rail journey across Switzerland the next day, the cost was about half the price to Zurich.

For the inbound leg, the fare was high from Basel so I waited a while – knowing that we could always get the train to Frankfurt if nothing changed. Happily, Swiss added a new flight from Geneva to Gatwick so I snapped the seats up at good fares.

I suggest you adopt a similar strategy.

Every day our travel correspondent Simon Calder tackles a reader’s question. Just email yours to s@hols.tv or tweet @simoncalder