by John Rauser - Farecast Fareologist
With the end of Summer and the onset of Fall, it’s time to get going and book your flights for the Holidays. I’ve talked about Thanksgiving in some recent posts. Today I’m going to review what we saw in the run up to Christmas 2006 and make some suggestions for Christmas 2007. For the impatient, I’ll start out with a quick summary of the most important points.
Quick Tips
- Christmas was on a Monday last year. The Friday and Saturday before Christmas were the most expensive days to depart, with average tickets costing just under $400. The cheapest itineraries averaged about $300.
- Christmas falls on a Tuesday this year, and the easiest way to cut your airfare is to avoid departing on the Saturday before Christmas. Friday may be slightly less expensive, but flying on Sunday or Thursday will probably save you $30-45. Savings of $60-90 are possible by departing on Tuesday or Wednesday.
- The Sunday before New Year’s Eve will probably be the most expensive day to return this year. Returning earlier, on Thursday for example, reduces the average fare by $25.
- Airfares for holiday travel are volatile, moving up and down frequently. However, because demand is so great for Christmas travel, booking a ticket during a price drop can be difficult. If you’re fast (and lucky) enough to buy on the right day, typical savings are between $20 and $100. By the same token, if the price rises on a given day, don’t panic; if Christmas is still far off, the price may come back down in a day or two.
- During 2006, many Christmas itineraries saw price drops on October 1 and October 14-15. If you’re after one of the less popular itineraries that avoids the Friday or Saturday departure, watching prices through mid-October to see if these sales repeat should carry relatively little risk.
Know When To Fly This Holiday Season
Like Thanksgiving, carefully choosing your dates of travel for Christmas can have a large impact on the price of your ticket. The table below shows the average minimum price for the different Christmas itineraries Farecast tracked last year. Note that Christmas fell on a Monday last year, and New Year’s Eve was on a Sunday.
You can see that it was the date of departure that made the most difference, with Friday and Saturday departures being the most expensive. Departing a day earlier on Thursday saved an average of $30. Savings of $60-90 were possible by departing even earlier on Tuesday or Wednesday. Finally, flying on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day cost an average of $60-70 less than the popular Friday and Saturday flights.
As for your return, the two days immediately following Christmas Day, and the day before New Year’s Eve were the most expensive, but on average it was possible to save only $15-20 by choosing to return on Thursday or Friday.
It is interesting to contrast Christmas with Thanksgiving. People generally organize their dates of travel so as to maximize the number of weekend days during their trip. Because Thanksgiving occurs on a Thursday, there is a great demand for return flights the following Sunday and tickets that avoid this Sunday return generally cost much less.
Christmas, on the other hand, was on a Monday last year, and it was the date of departure that had the biggest impact on price. New Year’s Eve introduces another twist; Sunday was New Year’s Eve last year, and tickets that returned on Saturday were more expensive than those the returned on New Year’s Eve. Apparently the desire to be at home and celebrate properly overrode the typical desire to get in an additional weekend day while away.
In 2007, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve each advance a day to Tuesday and Sunday respectively. This figures to change the date combinations that are the most expensive. I expect Saturday the 22nd to be the most expensive day to depart this year, and I suspect that people will be less inclined to return immediately after Christmas, instead extending their stays through the end of the week. Higher demand for flights on Saturday the 29th and Sunday the 30th will probably make these the most expensive return dates.
The early read for 2007 is that departing on Thursday or Sunday figures to save you $30-45 over Saturday the 22nd. Returning on the Wednesday or Thursday after Christmas Day will be perhaps $25 cheaper than returning on Sunday the 30th, the day before New Year’s Eve.
Should you wait or buy now?
Once you’ve decided on the dates of your trip, you want to buy your ticket for a little money as possible. Booking your tickets immediately may not be the best choice, if you watch airfares and buy when prices are low you can save between $20 and $100 on most trips. But when prices drop, there is no guarantee that you can cash in. When the airlines lower fares during the busy holiday season, they will typically offer just a few seats at a time at the lower price, holding back the bulk of the seats to sell later for a higher price. So, when prices drop you are in competition with everyone else interested in your itinerary to get what might be just a handful of discounted seats, and the fastest clickers win. It can be frustrating to see a price drop, only to have it evaporate before you can book it. This problem exists to a lesser extent all year long, but because demand is so high for Christmas flights, it really requires perseverance and a bit of luck in order to catch a price drop for Christmas travel.
Know When to Buy
So you’ve decided to wait to buy your ticket hoping for a price drop. Last year many cities saw significant price drops in early October, with the largest number of drops coming on October 1, and October 14-15. You might like to watch prices between now and mid-October hoping for similar activity this year. But if you wait too long, the price of your trip can rise for good, costing you more than if you had just bought the ticket right away. To get a handle on what can happen, let’s look at the daily minimum price for a trip from Newark, NJ to Jacksonville, FL last year.
The lowest price on September 22 was $259 and by September 27 it had fallen to $238. On October 3 it spiked to $289, before falling back to $235 on October 15. On November 1 the price jumped to nearly $290 and would fall below $275 on only a few occasions before the flight departed on December 21.
The point of this play-by-play is not the specific dates or prices, they are unlikely to repeat in exactly this way ever again. Instead, I hope to illustrate two things: 1) Prices are volatile, going both up and down. If you are watching the price for a certain itinerary and it jumps up, you should not necessarily panic, especially if our model predicts a price drop. The increase may be temporary and price could come back down, possibly below the level it started at. 2) For every trip, there is a “too late” date beyond which the price will rise irrevocably. Waiting too long can cost you.
So if waiting too long is a danger, how long is too long? I found the “too late” date for each Christmas trip that Farecast tracked last year and averaged them to make the graph below, which shows the chance that it was too late to purchase a ticket for within $20 of the best price.
I consider two cases, trips that depart on Friday or Saturday, and those that do not. In both cases, the jumps line up with the two larger sales we saw for Christmas flights last year, October 1, and October 14-15. We see that with the very popular trips that departed on Friday and Saturday, the chance that you were “too late” rises quickly. Waiting to purchase these tickets was riskier. If, on the other hand, you were interested in itineraries that departed on days other than Friday and Saturday, waiting for a price drop carried less risk. In both cases, each day beyond mid October meant increasingly greater risk of a permanent price increase.
Do you have questions about airfares, holiday or otherwise? Send an email to fareologist@farecast.live.com and I’ll do my best to answer them.