There’s plenty of tried and true advice when it comes to booking holiday flights. For Thanksgiving, try to avoid the most popular dates – Wednesday to Sunday bad, Tuesday to Friday good. Ditto for Christmas and New Year’s, but those windows are variable so try to figure out the most desirable dates and vary yours by a few days in either direction. In almost all cases, flying on the actual holiday will save you money.
But when should you actually book? Priceline did a deep data dive to try to answer that. The popular travel site looked at the top domestic routes over the past three years to determine how prices fluctuate before and approaching the holidays. It also determined the cheapest day of the week to book for each city pair (in most cases it’s Friday, which they found was $3-11 cheaper than booking any other day of the week).
As you’ll see in the numbers below, results can vary widely. For San Francisco to LA, you’d pay $115 round-trip four weeks out, and $188 one week out. But LA-New York was actually $50 cheaper booking last-minute. And New York-Chicago shows almost no change throughout the booking window.
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