Thanksgiving is just a week away, and in a month we’ll be celebrating Christmas. With these holidays comes not only the anxiety of having to deal with your relatives, roast a 10-pound turkey, or try to find money under the sofa cushions to pay for all the gifts. One of the biggest headaches is the logistics of travel. Getting together with your loved ones—or family—can be very expensive, especially if you have to take a domestic flight. The average U.S. citizen spends up to $2,586 USD on transportation alone during the holidays.
However, don’t give up: travel experts and platforms such as Google Flight have cracked the code to finding the cheapest flights possible. It’s not a hack or a secret trick, but rather mastering the science of data to know when and how to move money and dates around. Google Flights is not just a search engine, but a predictive tool that uses the history of billions of flights. Here’s the ultimate guide to mastering the art of booking flights during peak season.
When to buy the plane ticket
Conventional wisdom often fails during times when everyone is traveling. You are often told to book just two or three weeks in advance, but all that does is make you end up paying a lot more. Flight prices skyrocket mercilessly starting 21 days before the departure date.
However, booking your flight months in advance is not productive either. Apparently, the “sweet” spot is actually 35 days, to be precise. Although the low price period is generally between 60 and 30 days before the holiday, Google Flight has found that the optimal point is exactly 35 days before. In other words, if the holiday is in the last week of November, you should be booking at the end of October to find the best balance between price and availability.
If you wait any longer, you may end up taking a financial risk. It’s like playing Blackjack, but gambling away your plane seat to go see your grandmother.
Christmas and New Year: a different deal
Traveling during Christmas offers a little more flexibility, as children don’t need to go to school and there are more public holidays. To get the best prices on airline tickets, you need to plan even further in advance.
The best time to book domestic flights for Christmas is, on average, 51 days before the departure date. In other words, you should buy your ticket between the end of October and the beginning of November. (If you need to fly home for Christmas to see your family or friends, we recommend that you buy your ticket now, as you are running late.) If you want an international flight, you need to buy much earlier: three to five months in advance.
Yes, you need to be in your T-shirt in August or September, already calculating how and when you are going to pay for your plane tickets to go abroad.
When to fly to avoid the crowds
Let’s be honest: no one likes having to go to the airport during rush hour. It’s like being herded together with a bunch of other people in a closed building, like cattle at the slaughterhouse. However, you can save money and avoid the claustrophobia of being in a sea of people if you choose your dates wisely. The principle is simple: fly when no one else is flying.
Applied to Thanksgiving, the cheapest days to fly are usually the Monday or Tuesday before the holiday. If you have a job where you can work from home or from your computer, it might be a good idea to arrive a couple of days early to see your family and work from there before Thursday. Another option is to take those days off before the national holiday and take advantage of this vacation before Christmas.
If, on the other hand, you want to arrive on the day itself and not have to deal with roasting the turkey and cooking, you can also fly on Thanksgiving Day, even if it means sacrificing a few hours of dinner. You’ll arrive at the family gathering when everything is already on the table, and you can start eating while everyone else is trying to digest and deal with their turkey and pumpkin pie overload.
To return home, flying on Black Friday or Monday will save you from the crowds—and a few hundred dollars as well.