The travel booking app Hopper looked at major holidays throughout the year and crafted a cheat sheet for booking domestic flights at their cheapest rate, using data collected from billions of flight prices collected each day, as well as historical trends. (The site claims to predict future flight costs with 95% accuracy up to one year in advance.)
It’s a methodology that makes sense: According to Hopper, most leisure travelers take an average of 2-3 trips per year and tend to center those trips around holidays.
The end result offers no huge surprises — you should give more time (2+ months) to planning Christmas and New Year’s trips, and those rates are higher than any time of the year … except, interestingly enough, for Easter (which itself requires 6+ weeks of advance booking to get optimal rates).
Wanna get away soon? Look to President’s Day (Feb. 18), where you’d need to book by Monday to lock in an on-average sub-$300 round-trip deal.
The full study can be found here.
Photo by Ankit Sharma on Unsplash
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