Quote:
Originally Posted by Ne7en
Is there any chance of last minute deals during the christmas break? My GF has received her work schedule and we both have a 5-6 day window where we could possibly jet somewhere? Just not sure where? $1000-$1500/ea. range. Sun & Sun, Anyone have any suggestions?
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There's always a chance, it's just a question of how large (or small) that chance is.
Seemingly everyone and their dog has some vacation time between Dec 22 and Jan 5 which leads to insanely higher demand than the rest of the year, which leads to higher prices on airfares, vacation packages, hotels, condo rentals, etc, during that date range.
The chances of an airline, hotel owner, tour operator, condo owner, etc, deciding they need to significantly lower their prices to fill seats or rooms during the highest demand period of the year? From what I've seen, this is a very rare event. At best, the price might shift from extremely expensive (relative to the rest of the year), to just quite expensive.
Of course, that doesn't prevent travel companies from marketing 'great Christmas deal getaways!'
Most people want to be home by New Years Day or perhaps the day after. So if you're going on a 1 week vacation, that means the latest those people can depart is December 26th. And the earliest they can depart is usually December 21.
So that's really only 6 departure days of the calendar year that all that demand is being focused on (Dec 21-26). That's why if you look at a bar graph of airfares for the cost of flights between any two cities, you'll see a huge spike around Dec 20/21, like this:
But to answer your question, there are a few all inclusive packages departing between Dec 21-30 that are under $1500/person after taxes and fees.
Like these ones for example:
http://yycdeals.com/all-inclusive-va...r5s4lmvsm;list
(all 3 are departing on Dec 30 though)
For comparison, the Breezes Varadero, which is at $1429/person over the holidays, can be had for $986/person in January.
A decent rule of thumb I find is to take a 'good' price from non-Christmas dates and multiply it by 1.4 or 1.5 to get the typical Christmas high demand holiday price (airfares, packages, etc).