Route brief · CHI → CMB
Chicago → Colombo
$1,115
round-trip · too little price history on this route to compare
Jan 11 '27 – Jan 24 '27 · 13 nights
Etihad1 stop
Cached fare — the booking search re-prices live before you pay.
Destination briefCMBColomboA working port city that most people leave immediately — for tea country, ruins and the south coast.Best windowDec–MarAirportsBandaranaike (CMB)All routes into ColomboWhen this route gets cheap.
Best time to be in Colombo: Dec–Mar. Fare history for this route is still thin, so we make no seasonal call yet.
The cheapest itinerary we are tracking makes one stop and takes about 18 hours outbound, on a 13-night trip — ticketed under Etihad, which on a connecting fare need not operate every leg. At $1,115 for 14,441 km each way, that works out to about $39 per 1,000 km flown. That is about the $40 typical of ultra-long-haul fares here. Across the 11 departure cities we track at a similar distance from Colombo, this fare ranks 6th — 1.7× the $660 we hold from New York. For context, the middle fare among the 27 routes of similar length we watch out of Chicago is $923. We have 1 month of cached prices for this route so far — not enough to call a fare cheap or expensive, so we publish the price without a percentage.
The one day we hold a cached fare for
Tap a date → live search
The median cached fare across this calendar is 25% higher than when tracking began on Aug 8 — $936 then versus $1,171 now, across 3 recorded snapshots. This is a calendar-level trend, so an individual deal above can be lower. The lowest single day we have seen here is $925, on Sep 1.
These are the only days we have a cached price for on this route so far — not the only days it flies. The search above covers any date.
Route facts
- Airports
- O’Hare (ORD) · Midway (MDW) ↔ Bandaranaike (CMB)
- Flight time
- ~18 hours outbound
- Distance
- ~14,441 km each way
- Airlines on the board
- Etihad
- Itineraries
- Connections on current fares
- Best months to visit
- Dec–Mar
CHI → CMB, answered.
How far in advance should I book CHI → Colombo?
We do not publish a number for this, because we cannot measure it yet. Answering it honestly means watching the same departure date on this route over many weeks as it approaches, and that archive is still filling up — so any "book N days ahead" figure here would be borrowed from somewhere else rather than measured. See /guides/what-moves-a-flight-price/ for the levers we can measure.
Are there nonstop flights from Chicago to Colombo?
The current cheapest fares involve a connection, ticketed under Etihad. Nonstop options exist on many dates at higher prices — check the live search for your exact dates.
Are these prices guaranteed?
No — these are cached fares found on real searches (this one on August 24). Airlines reprice constantly, so the booking search re-checks the live price before you pay. Fresher finds are far more likely to still be available.
Next step
Sleeping in Colombo?
Lock the flight first — then compare stays for Jan 11 '27 – Jan 24 '27 · 13 nights.
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Missed it?
Cached fares expire. This route has a feed of its own — follow it and the next CHI → CMB drop reaches you as soon as we find it.
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