How to Find Cheap Labor Day Airfare

Labor Day weekend in the United States generally means backyard barbecues or summer picnics, and usually it’s a big gathering of family or friends (or both). Most of the time, it just means a road trip to wherever the festivities are taking place, but the idea of getting a great deal on a plane ticket over Labor Day might just make you rethink the ho-hum barbecue route.

(That is, of course, not meant to be a slight against your family’s barbecue routine. I’m sure your dad’s grill skills are legendary, and your Aunt Clara’s potato salad enough reason to make the trip, but if they’ve done the same backyard party every year then they’ll be doing it next year, too, right? You can escape for one year. I promise.)

In this article, we’ll look at some of the ways you can get a Labor Day travel deal on a flight out of town for the weekend. Some of these tips are applicable at other times of the year (around other holidays and also between holidays), but some of them are more specific to holidays like Labor Day when people don’t feel the same compulsion to travel as they might around Thanksgiving or Christmas.

And hey, if you fail to find a killer price on a flight over Labor Day, then you’ve always got Aunt Clara’s potato salad to look forward to.

Be flexible with your travel dates.

Yes, the Labor Day weekend is a very short window for a getaway if you’re strictly limited to just that one Monday off from work or school. But if you’ve got more time to play with, then you stand a better chance of being able to avoid the most expensive flight times and days.

For starters, you can read up on which are the best and worst days to travel for Labor Day, but beyond that it’s a clever idea to let the aifare search websites do the hard work for you whenever possible. In other words, use the sites that have a box you can check that says something like “my dates are flexible” or lets you search for a particular window of flights within a few days of a given date.

If the site you’re using doesn’t have this kind of feature, you can take on the grunt work yourself just by putting different travel dates and times into the departure and return boxes to see whether the prices change. Which brings me to…

Be flexible with your travel times.

Being flexible is about more than just looking at different days of the week - it can also be about traveling at different times of the day. If you think about it, it makes sense. The best deals are often found at times when most normal people would prefer to still be sleeping. Even if you’re one of those normal people, if you’re more eager to save money than to get your beauty rest, you can definitely get a better deal if you shift the times of your flights.

Some of the times to look for the best deals on flights are those super-early morning flights and red-eye flights. By taking one of these pre-dawn flights you can usually avoid the worst lines, and these are the flights that are least prone to delays. Oh, and yes - they’re also the ones where you’re more likely to get a break on the fare, too.

Plan ahead, but don’t necessarily book it yet.

This may seem a little counter-intuitive, but hear me out. With holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the airlines know you’re going to be flying somewhere to see relatives, they’ve got blocks of the calendar marked off well in advance and will charge more for travel around those holidays - especially if you don’t book well in advance. With Labor Day, however, it’s another story.

Sure, it’s a holiday weekend and most people take advantage of their day off - but since not as many people fly over the three-day weekend, it’s not as easy for airlines to just jack up prices and leave them there. In fact, Labor Day is one of the times of the year when you’ll routinely see a flurry of last-minute deals come through in the weeks leading up to the holiday weekend.

If you absolutely positively must be somewhere over Labor Day weekend and you don’t want to chance it, then by all means keep an eye on the fares well in advance and book your flight as soon as it’s a price you like. But if you’re still on the fence about whether you’ll take off for the weekend, there’s no harm in waiting until the last minute to see if a deal comes along that’s so great you can’t pass it up.

Sign up for last-minute travel deal notifications.

Along these lines, there are some websites where you can sign up to get regular emails about last minute travel bargains, which are ideal for people who just want a vacation but aren’t picky about where they go. Smarter Travel is a good site to check, because the emails you’ll get are for deals from your home airport (as designated by you), so you won’t hear about spectacular fares you can’t use anyway.

Most booking sites will also let you set fare alerts for certain routes so that you’ll be notified when the price changes by a certain amount (usually an amount you determine), so if you have a few destinations in mind for a trip, set alerts for all of them and then whichever one comes in with the best price wins your vacation time.

Look at budget airlines.

There are some airlines in the United States that are considered “budget” or “discount” airlines. They’re no less safe or trustworthy, and in some cases they even offer more perks than some of the big airlines are giving their customers these days. And because some of them keep their fares from the big airfare booking websites, you’ve got to do a bit of sleuthing to make sure they don’t get excluded from your search.

Your first step is to learn about the discount airlines that serve your area. Many of them are regional, so you probably have a good idea of which ones serve your home airport just based on having heard the names before or seen the signs at the check-in counters. But by all means educate yourself about some of the big budget airlines in the United States, as well as some of the budget airlines that fly to Canada (if that’s on your itinerary).

Then, after you’ve done your searches for airfare on the big booking websites, click over to the individual websites of the discount airlines that serve your area. Many of them keep their fares to themselves, so that you won’t see them on any booking websites, and even the ones that do share their fares with booking websites sometimes keep the best deals for the people who visit their individual sites. So it’s always worth double-checking.

Look at alternate airports.

If your travel agenda includes a flight in or out of a big city, chances are very good there’s more than one airport serving that area. And if there are smaller airports in the area, there may very well be some deals to be found there.

Sometimes those discount airlines I mentioned above don’t fly into the biggest hub in a city - sometimes they fly into one of the secondary airports instead. But that’s just one reason why flights into those smaller airports might be cheaper. Another is that smaller airports may charge airlines less to operate there - and the airlines can then pass the savings on to you.

You can find out which airports are the alternates for big hubs in the U.S., and if you’re lucky you can use another smart feature on booking websites to let them do the work for you. If you see a box on the booking website you’re using that says “include nearby airports,” make sure it’s checked - then you’ll get results for all the airports in the area, whether you knew about them already or not.

photo by yummyporky