We've been urging travelers anxiously eyeing their flights home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's this year to book sooner rather than later. Google Flights is backing us up with new data that shows you should book your flights earlier than ever – especially over the holidays.
According to Google's newest data about flight booking windows, the best time to book Thanksgiving flights is in October – specifically, the best fares tend to crop up when you book between 22 and 57 days before the holiday, with a sweet spot coming 34 days out in late October.
But take that analysis with a grain of salt. What Google is saying here is that you're going to get the lowest fare, on average, during this extremely expensive time period. If you're actually hoping to find a good deal, you probably needed to book your flights with points and miles … or try to fly on Thanksgiving Day itself, when fares are almost always significantly cheaper.
This booking window for Thanksgiving is more or less on par with last year's recommendations from the flight search engine, but Google has changed its tune with Christmas.
According to its newest data, the best time to book Christmas flights is in late October and early November – between 33 and 67 days before travel – with fares bottoming out 56 days before travel, on average. That's almost a week earlier than Google's booking recommendations from last year.
Similar to the Thanksgiving data, this doesn't mean you're going to get a screaming deal in this window. It just means you won't be paying peak painful prices – just medium painful prices, in most cases.
In preparation for the holiday season, we dedicated a full episode of the Thrifty Traveler Podcast to helping you decide when to book your flights, and this backs us up. In that episode, we touch on the more important flight booking strategies like using partner points and miles and flying on the correct days to save big.
Listen to that discussion now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!
Bottom Line
Data from Google shows it's already high time to book your Thanksgiving flights – and the time to book Christmas travel is right around the corner.
Google's data showed that the time to book Christmas travel moved up by nearly a full week this year – a big shift due to the current expensive airfare climate.
