Farecast Blog

By: John Rauser - Farecast Fareologist

Here’s a snapshot of what we’ve seen so far this year for Christmas airfares. In the graph below, the red lines show the average price for the most expensive itineraries, those that depart on the Friday or Saturday before Christmas. The green lines show the average price for all other itineraries. The faint lines show the trend during the run-up to Christmas 2006, and the heavy lines show what’s happened so far this year.

After a period of falling prices in early October, the average fare for 2007 Christmas travel has really taken off in the last few days. This pattern matches closely what we saw last year. By now, the best prices have likely come and gone, particularly if you’ve got an eye for the busy weekend departure. If you haven’t bought your ticket by now, the odds are that you will end up paying more than you needed to, though there are still spot sales to be taken advantage of. Use Farecast’s predictions and e-mail alerts to inform your decision. As always, the easiest way to control your fare is to be flexible with your dates of travel. For Christmas, avoiding the Saturday December 22 departure will result in the biggest savings. Check out our flexible travel tools to see how much you can save for your cities.

You can also see that Christmas travel is quite a bit more expensive this year as compared to 2006. The exact value of the year-over-year increase varies from day to day, but it has mostly been in the 8-12% range. This is in contrast to Thanksgiving, where prices have been only 3-7% higher year-over-year. I wondered if the magnitude of the Christmas increase was setting the stage for significantly higher prices throughout next year. So far, this does not appear to be the case. For January departures, the year over year increase has been a more modest 3-5% so far. This is something I’ll definitely keep an eye on as the data for next year continues to roll in.