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Priceline’s guide to cheaper holiday airfares

Priceline: Shatner holiday

Priceline.com’s annual calendar, showing the least and most expensive days to fly over Thanksgiving and the December holidays, has a new twist: You can customize it for your city.

Look for the “Best Days to Fly for the Holidays” box at the bottom of Priceline’s flights page. You enter the cities you want to travel between, and it generates a calendar showing the lowest published ticket price for various departure days. Then you choose your flights.

Nice and naughty dates: Generally, the cheapest days to depart are Nov. 23, 24 and 27 (the holiday itself) for Thanksgiving, and Dec. 22, 23 and 24 for the Christmas period, Priceline.com said today in a news release. The most expensive are Nov. 21 and 26; Dec. 19, 20 and 28; and Jan. 3 and 4. But what you actually pay for your round trip depends a lot on your return date too.

What about LAX? If I left Los Angeles for New York on a “cheap” date, Monday, Nov. 24, I’d pay $393 round trip, or $15 less than leaving on an “expensive” date, Friday, Nov. 21, providing I returned on Saturday, Nov. 29, my Priceline.com search showed. But if I returned Sunday, Nov. 30, I’d pay the same, $568. Why? Probably because no matter when people leave, a lot of them want to get back home by Sunday for work. But on two sets of LAX-San Francisco dates I checked, Saturday and Sunday returns cost the same. So you never know.

The big picture: Nationally, holiday airfares have been falling, as my colleague Peter Pae and I reported earlier today in “Travelers enjoying lower U.S. domestic airfares,” and they’re now, on average, less than they were last year, according to Farecast.live.com. But for LAX, the picture is a little different, Farecast.live.com spokesman Nick Leahy told me. As of last week, he said, Thanksgiving fares to 12 top destinations were running 4% lower than last year, but Christmas-season fares were 9% higher.

— Jane Engle, assistant Los Angeles Times Travel editor

[Photo: priceline.com]

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10, 2008 at 4:32 pm by Jane Engle and is filed under Airline travel, Deals, Family & Kids, Frequent Flier, News, Tips & Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

One Comment on “Priceline’s guide to cheaper holiday airfares”

Nicolle Boren Says:
November 11th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Air travel isn’t the only thing you can save on during the holiday season. Many hotels have extremely low rates in November & december due to the lack of tourism… thus making it a perfect time to book a vacation to someplace you might not normally think you could afford. In addition to the seasonal reductions, the economic crisis has hit everyone, including hotels, who have lowered rates significantly to be more attractive to travelers during the holiday season.

I work at VibeAgent.com and think your readers may be interested in checking us out for finding & comparing hotel rates. We search more than 20 travel sites to find and compare teh best rates and availability.

Enjoy & safe holiday travels from VibeAgent.com!