Cheap Air Fares for Christmas/New Year's
Flying to Jackson, Wyoming, can be expensive during the peak
winter holiday season . . . unless you know the tricks for nabbing
the lowest fares.
Photo: Allen Thornton, Alamy Images
by Wendy Perrin
Yesterday a fellow Conde Nast Traveler editor and ski buff knocked on my door, asking how to snag the cheapest fare to Jackson Hole over the New Year's holiday. Nabbing affordable fares during peak holiday periods is tricky, of course. It gets trickier if you're flying not to a major hub like Salt Lake City but to a small airport like Jackson, Wyoming. And it's even trickier if you're not willing to fly on the actual holiday itself or the night before: During the two-week holiday crunch that starts a few days before Christmas and ends a few days after the New Year, the days with the cheapest fares are Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day.
I knew my colleague needed a baseline: What's been the lowest air fare between New York City and Jackson during the holidays in past years? And I knew the tool to use for this: FareCompare. I even emailed its CEO, cheap-fare guru Rick Seaney (the subject of this fascinating profile on Conde Nast Portfolio), for advice. Here are Rick's tips for finding the lowest fares, not just for the holidays but for any time of year:
(1) Start about four months ahead (earlier for holiday flights).
The airlines manage revenue in four-month cycles, so any fare you find more than four months ahead is not the cheapest price (with the exception of holiday-period fares).
(2) Pinpoint the current cheapest fare for your route.
Punch your city pair into FareCompare's Find Fares tool. The cheapest fare for NYC-JAC in December and January is $420. The cheapest fare on the dates when my colleague can fly? $480.
(3) Find out the historically lowest fare for your route.
Learn how after the jump.
When you punch in your city pair and then scroll down to the bottom of the results page, you'll see a list of the most recent fare sales for your route and how low those prices went. For the NYC-JAC route, a fare of $270 was available way back on February 19, and a $348 fare was available on May 7. This tells me that fare sales on this route are infrequent and we shouldn't expect them to happen this fall. That means my colleague should buy NOW.
(4) Sign up for FareCompare's free air fare alerts by email.
As soon as you know you want to fly somewhere, and you'd like to buy your ticket when prices drop, sign up for fare alerts.
Whenever the fare drops for the route you want or for a part of the
world you're interested in, you'll receive an alert that tells you the
new fare and assigns it a rating of 4, 3, 2, or 1 stars (4 means the
fare is at its historical all-time low). Because FareCompare gets its
data directly from the airlines and processes the data immediately,
subscribers to its alerts receive the new fares hours before they are
posted on airline Web sites or online-travel-agency sites. "This puts
subscribers in a select group of people who have the best shot at
getting the cheapest seats," says Rick.
So I'm now signed up for 3-star-fare alerts from New York City airports to everywhere in the U.S., Caribbean, and Europe!
RSS Feeds
There is another great site out there that you might not be aware of called Airfarewatchdog.com.
These guys search thousands of fares by hand every day to come up with the best possible deals. They cover all of the discount carriers as well as specials listed only on airline websites. Plus you can sign up for a daily newsletter which let's you know about the best fares from your city.
Worth checking out...
Posted by: neutronic | September 14, 2007 at 11:03 AM
Thanks for reading, Neutronic. I did actually blog about Airfarewatchdog a few weeks ago. You can read my take here: http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler/blogs/perrinpost/2007/05/where_to_find_s.html.
Posted by: BrookWilkinson | September 14, 2007 at 04:23 PM
What do you think about buying holiday tickets during a sale using "guesstimate dates" and then paying to change the flight/dates later if necessary? Even with the change fee, this might still be cheaper than the jacked up holiday fares.
Posted by: frosta | September 15, 2007 at 06:58 PM