Where Americans Want to Spend the Holidays

The week between Christmas and New Year’s, my wife and I sat on the kitchen floor with a laptop and two credit cards, trying to decide between two trips that were never really in competition: my parents in Michigan, or four nights somewhere warm with the kids. We did Michigan. But the way we got there is the way I now check every holiday trip, and the order matters more than the destination.

First, who is actually flying

Before I open a search box, I count heads and ages. Six and eleven is an easy pair in most ways (both sit in a seat, both eat a full meal, neither needs a lap ticket), but it is a miserable pair for anything overnight, because they will not sleep and I will not either. So red-eyes are out, which immediately kills the cheap options to Europe and most of the cheaper transcons.

Then the suitcase arithmetic. One checked bag between the four of us, three carry-ons, which sounds lean until you remember that holiday travel means gifts. I budget $70 each way for the bag on the legacy carriers. Spirit and Frontier will sell it to you for less up front and take it back at the gate; I have stopped pretending that math favours me.

Then the two options, side by side

Grandparents in Grand Rapids versus a rented condo near Tampa. Different animals entirely. A flight into Tampa in late December runs about $520 a head from where we live, so $2,080 before bags, and the condo is another $1,400, and meals are on us because there is no grandmother cooking. Grand Rapids is $310 a head, $1,240 for the four of us, and my mother feeds everyone for a week. That is not a close comparison, and it never is, which is the thing about holiday travel that nobody says out loud: most Americans are not choosing a destination. They are choosing the same airport they have flown into since they were nineteen.

If you are genuinely picking a place rather than a person, the second option has to be somewhere with nonstop service from your home airport, because connections in late December are where good trips die. I once watched a family of five miss a connection in Charlotte and spend eleven hours in a terminal with a six-year-old. I think about that family every year.

For families in the Midwest, a cheap leg like Cheap flights Detroit — Lansing is worth pricing even if it looks like a drive, though I will say plainly that the drive wins: two hours on I-96 in your own car, with your own snacks, beats ninety minutes of security theatre and a rental car. There are routes where flying is simply the wrong answer, and short regional hops are the clearest case.

• How long the nonstop is, door to door, including the drive to the airport
• Whether the return lands before 9 p.m. (school the next morning is not a rumour)
• Bag fees, both directions, for the whole family
• The cost of a fourth seat versus three plus a lap child on a short hop
• Whether the cheap fare is refundable enough to survive a snow event

See also: Same Vial, Different Story: How to Spot a Real Sleep-Peptide Provider

The part I keep getting wrong

I used to think booking early was the whole game. It is not, and the day I buy has never once changed the price, no matter what the internet says about Tuesdays. Holiday fares bottom out on a schedule I cannot predict, so I set a price alert and forget about it for two weeks. When it fires, I book, because the alternative is refreshing a seat map at midnight like a raccoon.

What actually decides it, every year, is whether the people we are visiting live near an airport with nonstops, or whether we are the ones doing the driving.