By: John Rauser - Farecast Fareologist
Here’s a quick recap of how Thanksgiving prices have been tracking year-over-year. In the graph below, the red lines show the average price for the popular, and expensive, itineraries with a Sunday return. The green lines show the average price for all other itineraries. The faint lines show the trend during the run-up to Thanksgiving 2006, and the heavy lines show what’s happened so far this year.
You can see that prices for Thanksgiving trips have been tracking higher than last year. The exact percentage moves around from day to day, but the year-over-year increase has lately been in the 3-7% range. The gap has been closing over the last few days, and as of today, the increase is 4%.
In previous posts, I noted that during early September 2006 many cities saw price drops for Thanksgiving travel, particularly the less popular itineraries that avoided the Sunday return. The price drops played out a little differently this year. There was one set of very short lived price drops on Saturday, September 8th, but the week of consistently lower prices we saw during the second week of September last year did not repeat this year.
Like last year, the average price has been increasing since mid-September. While the airlines are still lowering prices for a sprinkling of itineraries each day, the best prices are drying up for increasingly many itineraries. If you haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to start shopping now for Thanksgiving airfare, particularly if you’re interesting in a ticket with a Sunday return. Use the price history graphs and predictions on farecast.live.com to help you make a decision about when to buy.
As always, the easiest way to control your fare is to be flexible with your dates. Our flexible travel tools are a great way to quickly see which travel dates are cheaper and by how much.
I’ll continue to post updated graphs as the season progresses.