The experiences sector has seen a boom in recent years as travelers are choosing to spend more money on experiences than possessions. Skift Research’s Venture Investment Trends in Travel 2024 report revealed experiences was one of the few sectors in travel to see an increase in venture capital investment.
2024 holiday airfare special report: 7.2 million pieces of data show how valuable your airline miles are this season
03.10.2024 - 17:21 / thepointsguy.com
The holidays are an expensive time of year — especially if you're hoping to travel to visit loved ones or head out on a peak-season vacation.
As you've probably noticed, airlines often raise their airfare prices during periods of peak demand, including around Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's. Thankfully, as savvy travelers know, you can leverage credit card rewards and airline loyalty programs to help offset these higher costs even during the pricey holiday travel season.
However, being able to use your miles for these peak-season holiday flights doesn't mean it's always when you'll get the best value for those miles.
Most U.S. frequent flyer programs no longer use fixed award charts to price flights and instead price their award flights more dynamically (meaning the price varies). This means you probably can use your miles for virtually any flight they have for sale with cash — but it may cost you more miles than you wish sometimes.
Since we are The Points Guy, we don't just want to tell you how much it'll cost you to buy your ticket with cash during the holidays, but also how far your points and miles are going to take you this year.
For the first time ever, we enlisted the help of our friends at Points Path to collaborate on a special holiday airfare report that examines both cash and award prices.
Points Path, which launched to the public in Jan. 2024, is a free browser extension that runs on top of Google Flights and adds the prices of flights in frequent flyer miles next to the cash prices produced by Google's search results. The extension then indicates whether a user should use miles or cash on any particular flight to get the best deal, and it's currently available for Air Canada, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue Airways and United Airlines — though we focused on the five domestic carriers in this analysis.
You can download the Points Path browser extension by clicking here.
Are any airline loyalty programs playing on the "nice list" and offering better mileage award options than others when booking holiday trips? And can you get even more value for your miles by traveling on certain dates?
With over 7.2 million pieces of real-world data at the ready, here's what we found.
We're not going to bury the lede here — when you look at the number of miles you'll need for flights over Thanksgiving and Christmas, the amounts aren't pretty.
Based on Points Path data, the average economy ticket across all five domestic carriers is 38,473 miles on nonholiday dates. During Thanksgiving week, that average climbs to 49,680 miles — an increase of 29.13%. And over Christmas, it jumps to 60,518 miles, a 57.3% jump.
The trend held true across all five airlines, too. Each one
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