When Should You Book Your Holiday Flights? Understanding Peak Travel Periods and How to Save Money

Holiday travel patterns reveal a fascinating disconnect between traditional weekly travel trends and seasonal anomalies. While Friday typically dominates as the busiest travel day throughout most of the year, with Tuesday registering as the quietest, the winter holiday period shatters these expectations entirely. Understanding when airports experience their highest volumes can mean the difference between facing chaotic terminals and enjoying a smoother journey while paying significantly less.

Christmas Travel: A Predictability Challenge

The Christmas travel window presents more complex forecasting challenges than Thanksgiving, primarily because the holiday’s day-of-week placement shifts annually, creating unpredictable ripple effects on airfare and crowd patterns. This year, with Christmas landing on Monday, both Tuesday and Wednesday of that week are likely to experience abnormal congestion.

According to Transportation Security Administration checkpoint data spanning recent years, the three busiest travel days typically cluster in the immediate pre- and post-Christmas window. Notably, relatively few passengers move on Christmas Day itself or New Year’s Day—patterns that airlines and airports have observed consistently. The days immediately following Christmas, however, see “wildly popular” demand, rivaling or exceeding Thanksgiving’s crush.

Recent booking platforms offer illuminating projections. Chase Travel identifies Friday, December 22nd as landing among the top three busiest days for all December 2023 and January 2024 bookings, alongside Saturday, December 23rd and Saturday, December 30th. Simultaneously, Hopper data suggests December 22nd will command the season’s highest fares, with airfares for Christmas travel averaging $400—representing a 12% decrease from the previous year but remaining 29% above 2019 holiday pricing.

One silver lining: Hanukkah’s earlier start this year (December 15th through 23rd) compared to its 2022 dates (December 18-26) may distribute travel demand more evenly, potentially easing mid-to-late-December congestion.

Thanksgiving’s Single Busiest Day

The Sunday following Thanksgiving represents the year’s single most congested airport day. TSA data demonstrates this starkly: last year, approximately 83% more passengers traveled on that Sunday compared to Thanksgiving Day itself, establishing it as 2022’s busiest travel day. This pattern held true historically, with that same Sunday ranking as the busiest airport travel day in both 2019 and 2021.

Recent months confirm intensifying holiday travel volumes. The Fourth of July weekend in 2023 set new records when over 2.884 million people passed through TSA checkpoints on the Friday before July 4th—surpassing the previous all-time record of 2.882 million passengers who moved through checkpoints on the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 2019.

Based on four-year TSA checkpoint trends, Sunday, November 26th appears poised to be the busiest Thanksgiving-period travel date in 2023, with Wednesday, November 22nd following as the second busiest. Even flying one day earlier—Saturday, November 25th—typically sees considerable traffic.

Strategic Cost-Saving and Crowd-Avoidance Tactics

Travel on the holiday itself. The data strongly supports this counterintuitive approach. Last year, 23.4% more passengers flew on the day after Christmas than on Christmas Day (which fell on a Sunday), indicating price premiums attach to off-holiday dates. Domestic flights on actual Christmas Day average approximately 26% less than peak-season pricing according to Hopper analysis.

Choose early departures. Beyond crowd mitigation, morning flights reduce weather and operational delay risks. Bureau of Transportation Statistics data from early 2023 shows 7.8% of flights experienced delays due to late aircraft arrivals—a factor that compounds during congested holiday periods.

Extend your trip strategically. For Thanksgiving, flying on Monday of Thanksgiving week with return travel any weekday the following week substantially reduces costs. Hopper’s data reveals airfares average 40% less on the Monday after Thanksgiving versus the previous day’s Sunday exodus. For Christmas, Monday or Tuesday pre-weekend departures with mid-week returns create similar savings patterns.

Consider unconventional celebration timing. Shifting holiday observances by days or weeks through flexible travel dates removes you entirely from peak-period pricing—though this approach requires schedule flexibility many travelers lack.

The aviation industry’s complex interplay between holiday calendars, workweek structures, and passenger behavior creates exploitable patterns for savvy travelers willing to deviate from traditional departure timing.