Since late May 2015, major airlines in North America have been announcing great deals on low airfares to Costa Rica, and this trend seems to be developing into an all-out war.

The ongoing airfare battle has been reported on by The Costa Rica Star over the last few months. One of the first airlines to launch an initial salvo in this battle for cheap plane tickets was Volaris, which operates in Mexico, the United States and Central America. Alaska Airlines and Southwest retaliated accordingly. In early June, we published our own findings about incredibly low round-trip flights from Boston to the Juan Santamaria International Airport (SJO), which could be found on Kayak.com and on The Flight Deal, which sometimes requires the use of the Matrix booking system by ITA Software.

It so happens that Tom Parsons of BestFares.com has been closely following this low airfare battle; he recently published his findings on The Dallas Morning News:

Houston is also having an effect on fares out of Dallas. United appears to be retaliating against both Southwest, which is launching new international flights from Houston Hobby, and American, which has been matching Southwest fares out of Houston. We recently saw a sale from Dallas on United for $225 to Belize, $259 to San Jose, Costa Rica, and $329 to Liberia, Costa Rica. The fares to Liberia are normally in the $700 to $900 range, so it is a dramatic drop.

 

When looking for deals out of Dallas, I’d look at Belize, San Jose, Liberia, Los Cabos, Puerto Vallarta, Cancún, Mexico City and Montego Bay for travel after Oct. 15. The prices we are seeing on some of these routes are very similar to what we are seeing out of Houston on Southwest and United.

This report from Mr. Parsons is very interesting insofar as the extremely low fares to the Daniel Oduber Quiros International Airport  (LIR) in Guanacaste, which is a destination that it is often far more expensive to land in and depart from. This battle for low air fares may continue for a few more weeks as airlines try to entice budget travelers to fly to Costa Rica during the low tourist season, which typically wraps up around October.