TRAVEL INSIDER : Some ‘Wait’ Problems Can Pay Off in the End : Trends: Finances, volatile air fares are two reasons why many Americans book trips at the last minute.

Call them The New Fashionably Late.

Maybe it’s because Americans’ finances are shakier than they used to be, and we only know at the 11th hour whether we can really afford a trip. Or maybe it’s because most Americans are taking shorter trips these days, and we figure a smaller distance and duration ought to require a shorter lead time. Or maybe it’s because airlines have sabotaged their own advance-purchase incentives by persisting in fare wars that change prices hourly and penalize those who lay plans well in advance.

In any event, tourism professionals agree that Californians, and Americans generally, are booking more last-minute trips than ever.

In many cases these days, said Bill Howe, general manager of the California Hotel-Motel Assn., “instead of planning it six months out and making reservations, they’re waiting until a month out.”

Though there is general agreement on this point, there don’t seem to be any new statistics. However, a national inclination to travel procrastination was already clear in 1990, when Better Homes and Gardens magazine commissioned a national survey by the U.S. Travel Data Center. For trips of three days or fewer, the survey found, 65% of the respondents without children made plans a month or less before the journey. (Those with children were more likely to plan ahead.) For trips lasting a week or more, about one in three travelers made plans less than a month in advance. (In that category, parents and childless travelers ran about even.)

The disadvantages to last-minute travel are no secret. Your favorite hotel could be booked solid. You could end up paying full-fare coach on plane tickets, which is often two or three times the price of a restricted coach ticket that was purchased a month or more in advance. The rental car lot may be empty. If your trip is built around an event like a concert or theatrical performance, you could end up sitting behind a pillar.

“It’s a crapshoot,” said Eric Gustavson, a partner in a San Francisco hotel-booking service who deals frequently with procrastinating travelers.

But there’s a reason people play craps. And if you’re going to travel at the last minute, for whatever reason, there are ways to take advantage of the situation.

As a partner in San Francisco Reservations (800-677-1550), a 6-year-old firm that tracks discounts and books reservations at 230 Bay Area hotels, Gustavson often sees hoteliers grow nervous of “valleys” in their bookings and offer up last-minute specials to put bodies in their beds. Travelers calling the hotels directly probably won’t learn about those specials unless they question the reservationists carefully.

Until many reservationists hear the words “best available rate” or “best value,” Gustavson said, they will offer higher published “rack rates.” Callers should be persistent in seeking discounts, especially weekend packages among hotels that rely heavily on midweek business travelers, and weekday rates among smaller hotels that tend to fill up with leisure travelers every weekend.

Another little-known opportunity for last-minute lodgers has to do with the industry’s record-keeping habits. Many hotels do their budgeting monthly, and are careful to compare their occupancy rates with the same month from the year before. “What they want to do is meet or exceed budget, obviously,” said Gustavson.

And so, if some hoteliers find that their monthly room-nights total is running behind--that is, they’re likely to rent fewer rooms in the month than they did a year ago--”then they get really aggressive in their discounting,” said Gustavson. “And that happens in the last week or so of each month, and mid-December through the end of the year. It’s a logical business way of thinking.”

(Life would be easier for hoteliers, of course, if they knew room demand well in advance. Perhaps harboring such hopes, the Marriott hotel chain is offering special rates for nonrefundable, non-changeable bookings made and paid for a month ahead of time. At the New York Marriott Marquis at 46th and Broadway in Manhattan, that advance-purchase discount yields room rates of $129 nightly, compared with a $285 published rate. But even there, a last-minute traveler may not do much worse: If the rooms are available, the weekend rates at the same hotel--which a reservationist acknowledged only when I asked--begin at $149.)

The late-booking gamble is similar with rental cars. “If it’s there,” said Emily Porter, spokeswoman for the American Society of Travel Agents, “then you can usually negotiate it.”

The other big expense in most out-of-town trips is the air fare, and Americans by the thousands have learned that when it comes to air travel, those also prosper who watch and wait.

If you were planning to fly to New Orleans on Dec. 29 and stay a week, for instance, you might have booked your ticket in late November. The best coach round-trip fare on American Airlines for those dates then was $450. But then in the first week of December, American joined other airlines in a short-term offer of discounts for tickets bought by Dec. 11, and discounted the same New Orleans tickets to $278. Money saved by waiting two weeks and watching prices: $172. (Of course, if you waited beyond Dec. 11, the price rose to $450 again.)

Top-notch travel agents are tuned in to this kind of opportunity. In a recent national survey, half of the responding agencies said they had computerized “fare auditing systems” that automatically search for fare cuts and exchange tickets for better bargains. But many agents don’t have or don’t use those systems; and since finding a lower price after a sale adds nothing to a travel agent’s commission, there’s no immediate profit in it. Some travelers never realize the bargains they’ve missed.

Finally, for those procrastinators who have found a flight and a hotel room, and are ready for culture: the half-price ticket booth. In most of the nation’s major cities, arts organizations run central ticket booths offering 50% off on tickets for that night’s performances. With regular ticket prices running $20-$60, the savings on two tickets will buy your dinner before the show.

A sampling of ticket booths: In San Francisco, TIX Bay Area (known as STBS before November), run by Theatre Bay Area at Union Square (415-433-7827); in San Diego, Times Arts Tix, run by the San Diego Theatre League, 28 Horton Plaza downtown (619-238- 3810); in Seattle, Ticket Ticket at Pike Place Public Market and at Broadway Market on Capitol Hill (206-324-2744); in Chicago, Hot Tix, run by the League of Chicago Theatres, 108 N. State St., across from Marshall Fields (312-977- 1755); in New York, TKTS, run by the Theatre Development Fund in Times Square and the World Trade Center (212-768-1818). Los Angeles is one of the nation’s few major cities without such a service.

POSTSCRIPT: Airline liability.

On Aug. 2 in this space, I described new hopes for progress in the decades-old dispute over what a family is entitled to if a relative is killed in the crash or collision of an international flight. Now it seems the wait for resolution will last at least a little longer.

Under provisions that stem from a widely criticized international pact more than 60 years old, Americans can generally collect no more than $75,000 if a relative dies or is injured on a flight to or from this country. In their efforts to collect more, victims’ families in cases such as the Pan Am Lockerbie disaster often spend years in the court system, and have only rarely been successful.

Passengers’ groups and some travel industry representatives had hoped to settle the issue--and raise the award limit--with new federal legislation during 1992. But Congress closed down for the year on Oct. 9 without having backed the reform. All signs suggest that the legislation was a victim of conflicting lobbying efforts.

The Air Transport Assn., which lobbies for the major airlines in Washington, D.C., backed the legislation. But the changes were opposed and stalled by the Aerospace Industries Assn., which represents airline equipment makers including Boeing and General Electric.

Aerospace Industries Assn. spokeswoman Alexis Allen said the manufacturers believe they were “unfairly targeted” by the new liability legislation, and that it left them too vulnerable to awards of punitive damages. Backers of the legislation said they would try to revive it when Congress returns to session in the spring.