Clint Henderson, Managing Editor, ThePointsGuy, joined TheStreet to discuss the optimal time to book your holiday trip.
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00:00Let's turn to the travel season. October gets billed as the best time of the year
00:05to book holiday travel. Is that true and what kind of deal should we be looking for?
00:10Okay, so it is true. The loose rules are basically you should plan on booking your
00:15Thanksgiving flights by Halloween and you should also be booking your Christmas flights not long
00:23after, so early into the November, so around the election. So the thing is you want to set
00:31flight alert deals like I was talking about with Google. Google has flight alerts you can set. You
00:36want to be monitoring prices for the months leading up to when to book, but the best time to
00:41book, especially for domestic, is around Halloween for the holidays. Now, does that still apply
00:46because there was this period after the pandemic where everybody was going everywhere and you
00:51couldn't get a seat and that's why airlines expanded so much capacity. Are we returning
00:57to a more normal kind of trend in 2024? Yeah, everything's back to normal. So business travel
01:03has mostly returned. That insane level of demand we saw post-COVID or at least the worst of the
01:09pandemic, that has faded. So a lot of that pent-up demand has been eased. So we're returning to more
01:16traditional higher levels though because leisure travel is higher than it was pre-pandemic and I
01:22don't expect it will actually lessen at all. So I think we're still in peak travel, but I
01:27will say when it comes to prices, the same rules applied even when it was the most insane time
01:32right out of the pandemic. So what are your most important tips to getting the best deal for holiday
01:39travel? So I would say start monitoring your flights right now and book it if you haven't
01:43because time is ticking away. The closer we get to the holiday, the more expensive the flights will
01:48be and that's true no matter when you're booking. It's always the closest to the day you want to
01:52travel when prices are going to spike the most. I will say if you see a deal though, jump on it.
01:58Don't wait until a perfect time. If you see a deal, that's when you want to jump on it, but do set
02:03Google flight alerts. You want to really monitor prices and if you see a deal, jump on it.