How to Find Cheap Airfare for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Weekend

Whether you look at Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as the perfect opportunity to give back through a little voluntourism or just another three-day weekend, if you’re planning to do any travel at all over this particular holiday weekend it’s important to know how to find the best deals on airfare.

Three-day weekends make an ideal time for a quick getaway to a place nearby, or they can serve as the jumping-off point for a longer trip when you don’t have to take as many vacation days from work. With Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in particular, the fact that it’s in mid-January when many of us are longing for a break from cold weather makes it especially enticing.

Here are some tips to help you find cheap airfare for a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day trip.

>> Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is on January 21, 2013. 

Be Flexible

This is the top tip no matter where or when you’re traveling, and it’s even more important when you’re traveling over a holiday. The more flexible you are in terms of when you fly (both what day and what time), the better chance you have of finding the cheaper flights in a given time period.

Most airfare booking sites now have an option to keep your search flexible, so look for a box near where you enter your travel information that says something like “my dates are flexible.” Check that box and you will often get search results over a span of three days on either side of your initial search dates.

Learn When is Cheap to Fly

The price of airline tickets goes up and down throughout each day and each week, and there’s no set pattern to it – but there are certain days of the week and times of the day that tend to offer cheaper fares overall. Knowing what these are – and starting with them when you do your flexible airfare search as outlined above – will help immensely.

Wednesday is typically the cheapest day of the week to fly, followed by Tuesday and Saturday. The earliest flights on any day are usually the cheapest (because everyone would rather be sleeping!), and you can also often find deals on red-eye flights and other late night departures.

Look at All Area Airports

Most cities around the world are lucky to have one airport in the area, but some are big enough to warrant two or three. If you’re flying to a major city anywhere in the world, it pays to see if there’s more than one airport you might use for your arrival – sometimes a city’s secondary airport offers better deals.

Some cities have airport codes that allow you to search all area airports – like LON for all of London’s five airports – so try typing a city name into an airfare search and see if your destination has that kind of code. If not, you’ll need to search for each airport separately. Remember to look up your transportation options from each airport, too, so you don’t end up too far from where you want to be with no transportation.

>> Learn more about alternate airports to big U.S. hubs

Check Budget Airlines

The big airlines are the ones most of us have heard of, but every region has smaller airlines that have a much shorter list of destinations served and (sometimes) offer much lower fares. If you’ll be changing planes midway through your journey anyway, that’s a perfect reason to check whether you could switch to one of the smaller discount airlines serving your final destination.

Sometimes these smaller budget airlines will come up in airfare searches, but sometimes they’re too small or they just have a policy of not listing their flights with the big search sites. In that case, you can find out what airlines serve your destination airport by looking up that airport’s website, and then visit the websites of the various airlines you want to check out.

>> Learn more about budget airlines in the U.S., budget airlines in Mexico, budget airlines in Canada, and budget airlines in Europe

>> Learn more about finding weekend travel deals in general, no matter when you want to go.

photo by Iquo E