How to Find Cheap Christmas Airfare

For most people, Christmas is all about family and spending quality time with people you love (and may not get to see much during the rest of the year). It s a pity, then, that getting home for the holidays without spending a fortune can be such a royal pain in the you-know-what.

Finding cheap Christmas airfare is definitely a challenge, as anyone who s started looking can attest to. You plug in your travel dates and get hit with huge ticket prices. You think you can use the old trick of shifting your trip by one or two days in either direction and you still run into the same high prices. It s frustrating. Oh, and don t count on using those precious frequent flyer miles you ve accumulated, either, because the Christmas holidays are typically part of an airline s blackout dates.

But even though you may not find a super bargain-basement price on an airline ticket over Christmas, there are still some things you can do to avoid paying more than you need to for your flight.

In 2012, Christmas is on a Tuesday

Research book flights early.

If we tell you that September is when you should start looking for Christmas airfare, would you think we were crazy? Well, it doesn t really matter what you think, because the truth is that you might still be relishing the last of your summer tan, but September is when you need to start thinking about holiday travel.

Airlines start dropping their fares for the fall in winter in September, and though more price drops usually follow it s a good idea to be paying attention in September so you have a better frame of reference. This doesn t mean you need to buy your Christmas tickets in September, however, although it s usually best if you ve got your tickets purchased by the end of October.

Aside from the expense, in the current economy when airlines are cutting back on the number of flights they even have available, booking your trip earlier rather than later can help assure you that you ll get the travel dates you want.

To help you keep track of ticket prices, it s a good idea to set up an account at one of the online booking websites that will send you automated email alerts when the price goes up or down by a certain amount. That way, you don t need to be checking those sites constantly, but you won t miss out on a good deal.

Find out which of the airline booking sites let you set up email alerts in this article about how to use travel booking websites .

Check out some of the budget airlines on their own websites.

We all know the big airlines the so-called legacy carriers but there are a few discount airlines which sometimes slip under the radar. This is partly because their names aren t as well-known to us, and so we might just glance over them on a list of airfares, but it s also because we may not even see them on a list at all.

Most of the big airline booking websites don t include fares from even the more common budget airlines usually because the airlines themselves withhold that information from the booking sites, not because the booking sites are trying to be mean. But whatever the reason, it means you ll need to do a little more clicking before you re sure you re getting the best price.

And while you re at it, even if the best fare you ve found is on one of the big legacy carriers, you might want to check that airline s website anyway just in case the airline has reserved its best prices for its website customers instead of the booking engine s customers.

In addition to the airlines you ll find listed on online booking engines, be sure to visit the websites for some of these airlines too (some of them may be listed on some booking engines, but most aren t on any of those lists):

Learn more about the discount carriers you could use with our lists of U.S. budget airlines and Canada budget airlines

Be flexible with your travel dates.

Usually when you re booking a trip and you re told to be flexible with your schedule, you can move your departure or arrival date around by one day maybe two and you ll often find a dramatic price difference. As we noted with Thanksgiving, because so much of the travel around that holiday is concentrated into a few days it s actually not terribly difficult to move your trip around by a little bit and get a better deal.

Unfortunately with Christmas, because the busy and expensive days are more spread out over a longer period of time, it s more challenging to shift your travel schedule by a day or two and get any significant price difference out of that change. Making sure you re avoiding the most expensive travel days is a good start, but unless you ve got loads of time you can be away you ll have a hard time avoiding even the semi-expensive days around the holidays.

So although finding extreme price differences from one day to another isn t going to be as common around Christmas as it might be at other times of the year, it s a very good idea to know what days to stay away from entirely.

Look around for alternate airports.

While the big hub airports near your departure and arrival point are the ones you probably know best, and while they may usually have the best deals on airfare simply because they have the largest volume of flights, another thing to consider when you re really hunting for Christmastime bargains is that whether there are other airports you could fly in or out of.

Most of the time, a city s smaller airports have a hard time competing with the big airports on price. The big hubs have so many incoming and outgoing flights that there are more apt to be empty seats the airlines want to offload cheaply. But more and more it s the smaller airports in a given market which have become that area s hub for one or more of the discount airlines in the country making flights to that airport sometimes a great deal cheaper than the big airport.

Again, you may find that the big hub is still the one with the cheapest fares most of the time. But not always. And budget travelers at Christmas need all kinds of tools when it comes to finding the best prices, right?