Holiday Travel - Are You Going To Be Home For Christmas?
I was a little shocked when I read recently that domestic coach airfares around the holidays are topping $1000 in relatively large numbers. From USA Today:
According to Sabre Airline Solutions’ study of hundreds of thousands of tickets bought through September for Thanksgiving-period travel, 3.8% of round-trip tickets that consumers bought cost $1,000 or more — nearly double last year’s percentage. Another 5.2% of tickets purchased cost at least $900 round trip — also nearly double last year’s share, the study shows.
Granted, 3.8% and 5.2% of total ticket sales is not a huge number, but when you see that it’s double what it was last year, it’s a pretty impressive change - especially considering the economy right now. That’s some motivated travelers, for sure.
Let me just get this little shout-out in here - Mom and Dad, I love you, but there’s no way I’d spend $5,000 to fly us down to Texas to see you … but we’re looking forward to you coming up here next month! 
Of course, everyone’s situation is different and we wouldn’t actually pay $1,000 for a round trip ticket from Denver to Houston - if our families weren’t connected by two decent sized hub airports, we’d likely be bumping that number, but according to Expedia, we could do a round trip ticket arriving in Houston on December 20th and leaving on December 28th for about $450 per person. That’s before costs like baggage check (which we wouldn’t do - we ship our clothes when visiting family because it’s less expensive and makes airport navigation simpler), snackage and parking. Once we added up the incidental expenses, we’d probably be looking at about $2,500 for airfare this year.
One alternative would be to rent a minivan, which we’ve done in the past, but over the holidays it probably wouldn’t save us much money - $1,400 or so for the same time period, plus one hotel overnight each way, gasoline, plus higher costs when it came to meals on the road. Sure, we pack stuff to bring with us but that only gets you so far into a 16 hour drive.
We could just drive our car, but it has 108,000 miles on it and I’m not sure I would want to put that many miles on it … so that’s really not an option.
What are your plans? If your family is far flung, are you going to suck it up and spend the money on flights in order to have some valuable (some might say “priceless”) time with your loved ones? Will you rent a car or drive your own? Maybe plan on meeting somewhere in the middle? How about investing instead in a webcam so you can get together “virtually?”
