While Black Friday and Cyber Monday are chock-full of tempting travel and flight discounts, Travel Deal Tuesday, as it’s become known, has actually become the best day of the year to score a travel deal, according to the flight booking site and app Hopper.
In 2018, Hopper, which collects and analyzes billions of airfare quotes, saw more flights discounted on Travel Tuesday than on Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined—and it is predicting the same price drops this year. The site estimated that roughly 20 percent of all domestic and international routes will be on sale this Travel Tuesday, with savings of up to 40 percent on airfares.
So why the increase in flight deals? Hayley Berg, an economist at Hopper, explained in a statement that demand for travel is actually pretty low at the end of November and early December, when most people have already booked their holiday travel but haven’t yet started booking much for the coming year. Travel companies try to entice them to do so by rolling out attractive deals.
The company is predicting that flights to Dublin could be as low as $385 this year; flights to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, as low as $400; flights to San Jose, Costa Rica, as low as $515.
Hopper is forecasting that the destinations most likely to be on sale will include Tokyo, Sydney, Beijing, Iceland, Costa Rica, Cape Town, and London. The company reported that travelers should also expect to see major savings on hotels.
According to travel search site Skyscanner, there tend to be cheaper airfares available on Cyber Monday and Travel Tuesday than on Black Friday, but the site found that Cyber Monday was actually the best day to book out of them all. The airfare search and booking site recommends simply checking back often throughout the weekend for great fares.
