Should you wait to book Thanksgiving or Christmas travel? Don’t. In this interview, Nick Ewan, Editor-in-Chief of The Points Guy, breaks down why holiday airfares are already spiking — up 13% for Thanksgiving and nearly 20% for Christmas and New Year’s — and shares insider strategies to score the best deals, track prices even after you book, and get money back when fares drop (he personally saved $95 on a family flight to Denver!).
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
We’re going to welcome back to the program this morning, Nick Ewen. He is the editor-in-chief of The Points Guy, one of the most famous travel sites. Nick, it’s always great to see you.
Welcome back to the program this morning.
Nick Ewen, Editor-in-Chief, The Points Guy
Of course, thanks for having me back on, Jeffrey. Looking forward to our conversation.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah, and I should point out for the audience, this is going to be a two-parter. Nick’s got a lot to cover. So, Nick, in this first part, let’s talk about Labor Day is just around the corner.
I think it’s September 7th. And last chance for people to book travel, both for Labor Day, but also later in the year. Let’s talk about booking travel.
What are you hearing from your website visitors, through comments and whatnot?
Nick Ewen, Editor-in-Chief, The Points Guy
Yeah, so it’s really interesting, even though we’re still in the summer and it’s kind of hard to start thinking ahead to the turkey dinners for Thanksgiving and holiday travel around Christmas and the December holidays. Believe it or not, we are actually recommending that people book their holiday travel now. This is earlier than we typically do suggest.
So, usually we say September into early October, that’s the best window. But airfares are already elevated due to the ongoing conflict with Iran and jet fuel prices. We’ve already seen huge spikes in airfare, 27% year over year compared to last year.
And we’re actually seeing right now, Thanksgiving prices up 13% year over year, Christmas and New Year’s flights up nearly 20% year over year. So, even though it’s still hot outside, you actually do want to start thinking about those winter travels now, because we just don’t see prices dropping anytime soon.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
So, really good point. And my understanding is the earlier you book or the before you’re going to travel. So, if you know your plans, you develop your plans, the better off you’re going to be in terms of prices.
Just to paraphrase you, are you saying that prices actually could go up even higher as we near some of those milestone holidays?
Nick Ewen, Editor-in-Chief, The Points Guy
Yeah, I definitely think they can. If you wait to book, you’re taking a risk, bottom line, more so than in previous years, because we already are dealing with essentially an elevated floor for those prices. So, airlines are always going to increase their fares around the holidays.
They know it’s a popular time to travel. You’re essentially captive. If you’re going to see family for a Thanksgiving dinner, you can’t book that two weeks early, right?
Unless your family was willing to move the holiday up two weeks. No judgment if that’s the case. Some people have some flexibility, but Thanksgiving always falls on that fourth Thursday.
So, the airfare is already going to be elevated and it’s even higher this year. So, booking now is probably going to be your best bet. It really removes the risk of prices going even higher.
There’s actually another thing that’s really interesting. This is actually coming out of the pandemic. Airlines largely removed change and cancellation fees on their tickets, both tickets booked with cash as well as those booked with points and miles.
Now, there still are those basic economy fares, super restrictive. Generally, you can’t change them. But if you lock in a flight now, even if you’re like, gosh, that’s a little bit more than I wanted to pay, if by some chance that price does drop later on, most airlines will allow you to rebook that flight and get a partial credit back that can then be used towards a future ticket.
I actually just did this over the summer. We had a flight out to Denver with my family and I noticed the price dropped $95. That’s not an insignificant amount.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
That’s a lot. That’s like a hamburger.
Nick Ewen, Editor-in-Chief, The Points Guy
Yeah. So I rebooked that flight and I got $95 back in my pocket. And I’m now looking at using that for a future flight.
So definitely, even if you do lock in your flight, keep monitoring that price because it might drop and you might be able to get a partial credit for a future trip.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
So let me ask you, thank you for that, Nick. Let me ask you in terms of a follow-up, how do I get the best price? I mean, certainly I can come to thepointsguide.com.
That’s your site, not your site in particular, but that’s the Points Guide site. Where do I get the best? Because I see ads all the time and I don’t want to plug any one particular service, but I mean, do I go to a travel agent?
Do I go to you? Do I go to one of these third-party sites? And will they do the monitoring that you’re talking about for me?
Nick Ewen, Editor-in-Chief, The Points Guy
Yeah. So there’s so many tools out there, so many different sites you can use. A lot of people like going through their credit card portal because they already have some of these benefits.
Others prefer going directly to their favorite airline. I will tell you for me, the place I always go to start is Google Flights. It gives you a great snapshot.
If you’re looking at different dates, potentially different airlines, it will pull in all different airlines. So you can actually compare side-by-side and see which one is going to offer you the best rate. The other great thing about Google Flights is you can actually set up price tracking right there.
So if you’re logged in to your Google account, it will actually then alert you when the price changes on a flight that you are looking at. So that can be a really great tool. You don’t actually book the flights directly with Google Travel.
You just use it as essentially a price comparison tool. I almost always like booking directly with the airline. That just removes any of the kind of passing the buck that sometimes happens where if you book with like a third-party travel site and then the airline changes the schedule, you can’t actually talk to the airline.
You have to go to the travel agency that originally booked the flight. So I love Google Flights as a starting point because it allows me to compare across multiple airlines. I can even look for different dates to compare prices there.
But then I love the price tracking feature. I have probably a half-dozen flights that I’m monitoring for next year for some of my upcoming travel. I have that price tracking set up so that I can easily get alerted, hey, this price has dropped by 15%, 20%.
Now is potentially a good time to book.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah, that’s really smart. I want to get to insurance, travel insurance in a second. But as you were talking and talking about Google Flights, how pervasive is AI in the business that you’re in, in the travel business?
Are you seeing it? Because as you were talking about Google, I’m assuming that they scrape all the third-party sites. They’re the biggest search engine.
But is AI becoming useful in the industry that you’re in as the points guy, the news feed, and also the travel industry in general?
Nick Ewen, Editor-in-Chief, The Points Guy
Yeah, it definitely is. We have yet to see AI really impact necessarily pricing of flights, but a lot of people are using AI to help plan their vacations, to help narrow down possible destinations. AI, some of these tools can be a great resource to put in general parameters of what you’re thinking about for your trip and then get some recommendations to try to narrow down your focus in terms of hotels, maybe in terms of the flights that you’re looking at.
So there are definitely ways that it is impacting the travel planning process. Here at the Points Guy, we believe wholeheartedly in real authentic storytelling. So all the content we put out is written by a human that is really experienced in the world of travel.
We want to give you those real tips that we know from the hundreds of thousands of miles that our team logs every single year at the Points Guy.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah. And I appreciate that because I try to do the same thing. None of our content is created by anybody other than us.
All right. So I asked, I wanted to put the travel insurance conversation on hold. We did a show earlier in the week with Dan Klein, who is at the street.
I don’t know if you know Dan. I mean, I know journalists kind of all flock together and talk to each other, but he is really also runs Travel Host, a cruising site, and he thought it made sense to buy travel insurance. So when it comes to these looking far out into the distance and knowing that there’s a lot of uncertainty, you mentioned the Iran war, but also prices, you could get sick, anything.
Does it make sense when you’re buying that ticket for grandmas at Christmas or Thanksgiving or wherever you’re going, should you purchase travel insurance?
Nick Ewen, Editor-in-Chief, The Points Guy
Yeah. It’s such an individual decision. So here are some of the kind of parameters that I like to suggest to give kind of the framework for making the decision.
So number one, the first thing you want to do is understand whatever protections are included with the credit card that you’re using to purchase the ticket. A lot of popular travel credit cards that we love here at the Points Guy already include things like trip cancellation, interruption coverage, trip delay coverage, baggage delay insurance. So definitely read into exactly what is included there because that may give you enough peace of mind, especially if you’re talking about maybe a three or $400 flight, you’re going to be staying with family.
There’s not a huge out-of-pocket risk for having your flight or your travel disrupted. Now, where you might want to look at getting a more significant travel insurance policy is if you are doing a really significant prepaid out-of-pocket trip, think an expensive cruise to Antarctica, maybe to Asia, a safari, in Africa. A lot of these things require you to pay weeks or months in advance.
You’re talking about five figures of out-of-pocket expense. If you ultimately get sick or can’t take that flight or there’s some kind of unrest in the area where you’re unable to complete that trip, you could be out a lot of money. So those are generally the trip, those kind of bucket list trips where you have a lot of out-of-pocket expense, where sometimes those credit card policies won’t actually cover you.
So that’s where I always suggest investigating that kind of third-party travel insurance. The other tip I would suggest is oftentimes you see this even when you’re booking just a short flight to Charlotte, the airline will give you the opportunity to purchase travel insurance for $30 or $40, something like that. I always recommend not doing that.
If you are going to purchase travel insurance, go to a third party directly because that will often give you not just a better price, but also more comprehensive coverage. And there are a lot of sites out there that allow you to compare different policies with different providers to make sure that you are ultimately protected. Again, if you have one of those really significant out-of-pocket expenses for a really big trip you have coming up.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Last question before we close out this episode, and then of course, we’re going to bring you back tomorrow. But let me ask you about some of these travel advisories. Now, I would think that domestically in the U.S., obviously, there’s not war here that we know of, thankfully. There’s not a lot of the strife, like earthquakes and things like that. But if you’re going abroad or you book your travel, should you? Where do you go to check out where you should and shouldn’t go?
And how does that impact or how could that impact your travel insurance decision?
Nick Ewen, Editor-in-Chief, The Points Guy
Yeah, it’s a great question. I always leverage the U.S. Department of State. They will identify different countries and even specific regions within each country according to a sliding scale of how significant the risks are.
A lot of places have risks of pickpockets and things like that. But there are some ones where they say, do not travel. We actually advise against travel.
So that’s a good place to start to at least get a feel for what would be the potential risk here. A lot of travel insurance policies may actually cover you if you book a trip to a place that isn’t under conflict. And then ultimately, by the time your trip comes, there is some significant issue.
So you actually may be able to get reimbursed for that trip. But the other key thing to keep in mind, too, especially with the Iran war, is there may be destinations that are impacted that are nowhere near there because your flight is connecting through that region. So the Middle East has become a really important connecting hub if you’re flying from the U.S. to Asia or from the U.S. to Africa. So you could be going to a place that is completely immune from that conflict. But if your flight is routing through the UAE, it’s routing through Qatar, you may wind up finding your travel gets disrupted. So just keep in mind all of those things.
And if you are worried about having the potential for disruption, that’s where you definitely want to investigate an independent travel insurance policy. But read the fine print. No one likes doing that.
But you’ve got to know what is and most importantly, what is not covered before you commit to one of those policies. Because the last thing you want to do is buy a policy, spend that extra money only to have it not cover the reason that you purchased it in the first place.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah. And you may need one of these pairs of Amazon glasses that I bought because I can’t read fine print at my age. Nick, as I said, this is really important, but I think it dovetails into tomorrow’s conversation.
I want to bring you back to talk about credit cards. Will you come back tomorrow?
Nick Ewen, Editor-in-Chief, The Points Guy
Yeah, happy to. Looking forward to it.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
OK, Nick, thanks so much. And look, we’ll see you again tomorrow.
Nick Ewen, Editor-in-Chief, The Points Guy
Sounds good. Thanks, Jeffrey.
