Forget The TVs: Find The Best Flight Deals On Travel Tuesday

Shoppers across the United States have long been familiar with Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when retailers discount products to encourage consumer spending. Now, this trend has extended to the following week, with frequent flyers hoping savings can be found on Travel Tuesday.

When is Travel Tuesday this year?

Travel Tuesday falls five days after Thanksgiving and will land on December 3rd, 2024. According to a recent McKinzie & Company report, the days preceding it have been dubbed Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday.

Given the expanding popularity of manufactured discount days like Cyber Monday, customers have begun looking for discounts on the day in increasing numbers. Although Hopper coined the term in 2021, it did not really begin to take off until the last few years.

Some frequent flyers believe Tuesday is the cheapest day to book travel in general, with the search term Travel Tuesday increasing fivefold over two years. According to the data from Sojern included in the report, there were notable increases in hotel, cruise, and airline bookings by US travelers on Travel Tuesday 2023, compared with the two weeks before and the two weeks after.

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The spike in travel bookings was not unprecedented or unexpected. Given that travel bookings primarily take place online, there was also a spike on Cyber Monday, with some deals lasting through the week. While declining year over year, searches online for the term “Cyber Monday” still remain ten times higher than those for Travel Tuesday,

Is it just a US phenomenon?

While the majority of search interest in Travel Tuesday is concentrated mainly in the United States and Canada, the trend is not confined exclusively to North American travelers. A rise in searches has been observed in Australia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Spain.

Photo: McKinsey & Company

The places people are looking to visit when booking on Travel Tuesday are overwhelmingly warm destinations. While this could be related to discount tours or cruise packages, it could also be based on the temperature dropping in the Northern Hemisphere.

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Booking data for last year’s Travel Tuesday revealed a preference for destinations closely linked to resort accommodations. The average search traffic spiked higher for resort destinations such as Nassau, Bahamas, and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. The remaining destinations were led by Austin, Miami/Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix.

Searches across the 15 most popular destinations overall were up 37% on Travel Tuesday, compared with the average results for other Tuesdays in November and December 2023.

While deals this year have yet to be widely announced, several airlines are currently offering standard promotions, and more holiday-themed offers are expected to be announced in the coming weeks. Given that Travel Tuesday falls on December 3rd this year, it is a bit late for most traditional winter travel bookings yet early for many summer vacation bookings, so airlines might be incentivized to try and capitalize on the trend with themed offers.