- The first weeks of October are the cheapest time to book holiday travel, data shows.
- The best time to book Christmas flights is 71 days before departure, according to Google Flights.
It's not even Halloween yet and your family members are already nagging you to buy flights for Christmas. But this year, they actually have a point.
This Friday marked exactly 10 weeks before December 15 — that means pretty soon, flight prices are only going to increase from here on out.
The cheapest time to book flights for mid-December travel is 71 days before departure, according to 2023 booking data from Google Flights.
Travel-booking app Hopper similarly recommends travelers purchase their flights for Christmas before October 14.
"Airfare will remain low, but volatile (moving up and down day to day) through early October, before rising in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving and Christmas," economist Hayley Berg wrote in Hopper's 2023 Holiday Travel Outlook report.
In previous years, there's been a much longer buffer before flight prices start to climb for the Winter holiday season. In 2022, Google Flights calculated that average prices were lowest 22 days before departure, James Byers, a Google Flights product manager, said in an August blog post.
"If you want to save money on flights this holiday season, or any time of year, a little bit of planning can go a long way," Byers wrote. "Most of the time, it's better to book on the early side, especially when your plans aren't very flexible."