Farecast Blog

By: John Rauser - Farecast Fareologist

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of interviews about holiday travel with regional newspapers. For each one I do a detailed analysis for their region’s airports. This has revealed some interesting regional quirks. One I found particularly interesting is that travelers in New Jersey seem to prefer longer Christmas trips, while travelers in Miami prefer shorter trips. Here’s a table showing the average price last year for different departure/return date combinations for travel from Miami.

The darker blue indicates the most expensive trips, and you can see that when it comes to the return date, the days immediately following Christmas were the most expensive and presumably had the strongest demand. Now let’s go North to New Jersey and take a look at the same table.

The most expensive return dates for New Jersey travel were the Saturday and Sunday following Christmas. New Jersey travelers liked week long trips, not returning home until New Year’s Eve.

Why does this happen? One theory I like is that it has to do with the weather. It’s cold in New Jersey in the winter; most destinations will have better weather, and few will have worse weather. When you’re facing a couple more months of cold and snow before Spring rolls around, a few extra days away from home might seem a welcome respite. I’ve checked a few other cold- and warm-weather cities, and this theory has held up so far.

As I’ve mentioned before, Christmas moves a day forward from Monday to Tuesday this year, so I expect that longer trips will be more popular, and therefore more expensive, nationwide this year. Keep this in mind when you’re shopping for your holiday tickets. It’s still the case that avoiding the Friday and Saturday departure before Christmas will have the largest effect on your ticket price, but you can shave off a few more dollars by not returning on the Saturday or Sunday before New Year’s Eve.