Last summer, when Melissa Cuomo and her family began looking at round-trip flights from New York to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic for a holiday getaway, they assumed the $2,000-a-ticket price in the main cabin would come down. It never did.
A few months later, when the flights rose to $3,000 each, Ms. Cuomo, a teacher who lives in Roslyn Harbor, N.Y., was scouring the internet for alternatives when she spotted a number to call for group rates on JetBlue when traveling with 10 or more people. For their family of 15, she secured rates of just over $1,000 a ticket, saving approximately $30,000.
“Maybe we should have been doing this all along, but it was never necessary before,” Ms. Cuomo said.
The family’s challenge illustrates the state of travel over the 2026 holidays: Prices are up, but the determined are finding creative ways to go, whether at Thanksgiving, Christmas or during the week leading up to New Year’s Day.
Four in 10 consumers planned to travel this season, according to a holiday outlook report from the consulting firm PwC, down slightly from last year. Among those with travel plans, 38 percent said they planned to economize by staying in budget or midrange hotels.
“The desire hasn’t gone away,” said Jonathan Kletzel, the U.S. travel, transportation and logistics sector leader at PwC. Instead, he noted planning patterns such as: early booking, flexible reservations, and rebooking without penalty when travelers found a better post-purchase price.
All signs point to more expensive holiday travel, but with persistence, flexibility and creativity, there are ways to save.
1. Be Flexible
On average, airfares are up more than 22 percent in September compared with a year ago, according to the most recent Consumer Price Index.
While the increase is largely attributed to fuel costs that have spiked since the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran that began in February, travelers shopping for Thanksgiving flights have seen some prices double, compounded by demand.
Data from the flight search engine Kayak showed that domestic airfares were up an average of about $100 from 2025 rates five weeks before Thanksgiving. The travel booking app Hopper put the average domestic round-trip at $389 a ticket, 39 percent more than last year.
Remaining flexible on the dates you fly can pay dividends. Kayak recommended flying on Thanksgiving Day itself to save up to 19 percent over peak fares.
Flexibility also applies to where you fly. Katy Nastro, the aviation and travel correspondent for Flighty, a flight-tracking app, noted that airlines this holiday season have increased flights from hub to hub, favoring routes between major cities at the expense of smaller cities, where service may be curtailed.
She suggested considering flights between major airports and filling in the gaps with buses, trains or rental cars. Bargain shoppers should also price one-way flights on other carriers, and use miles to pay for the flight.
“If you’re looking for affordability this late in the game, you might need to make concessions,” Ms. Nastro said. One concession might be a connecting flight. According to Points Path, a website that evaluates flight prices in points and miles, nonstop flights cost about 20 percent more on average than connecting itineraries.
2. Skip the Flight
Getting creative may involve forms of transportation other than flying. In PwC’s holiday report, a third of holiday travelers planned to skip flying.
The cost of driving has surged, too. The average price of gas is $4.29 a gallon nationally according to AAA, compared with $3.19 last Thanksgiving. Financially, the appeal of driving grows with the number of travelers in one vehicle.
Using the average car, which gets 25.6 miles per gallon, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, gas for a 400-mile trip between New York and Pittsburgh would cost about $134 round trip. Google Maps puts the drive at about six and a half hours, excluding rest stops. By comparison, a nonstop flight between the two cities over the long Thanksgiving weekend, which takes about an hour and 40 minutes, excluding airport time, recently started at around $450 round trip, according to Google Flights.
The bus company FlixBus takes roughly nine hours to drive between New York and Pittsburgh. A recent round-trip ticket on the route started around $100.
Traveling the route by Amtrak train takes approximately nine and a half hours and was recently priced around $225 round trip.
Even the cheaper ground options are up from a year ago. Omio, a multimodal booking service that searches air as well as train and bus schedules, found that rates booked Thanksgiving through Christmas so far this year were up 29 percent for flights, 22 percent for trains and 15 percent for buses.
Since air and ground options involve a trade-off between time and money, consider pricing one-way travel on each and combining transportation methods.
“Usually when it comes to convenience versus price, convenience will be the loser,” Ms. Nastro said.
3. Book Now for Christmas
If you intend to travel over Christmas, book quickly. Points Path found that the best time to book a Christmas trip was about 56 days before departure, with a low-price window running 33 to 67 days out, or right now.
“Oftentimes, people will book Thanksgiving before Halloween, and wait to book their Christmas trip until the week of Thanksgiving or the week after,” said Hayley Berg, the lead economist at Hopper. “You don’t want to do that this year. There will be very expensive fares if you wait too long.”
Hopper said the current domestic round-trip at Christmas averaged $452, up 22 percent over last year.
4. Travel in the December Lull
For a few weeks post-Thanksgiving, there’s generally a lull in travel until Christmas week. If you can move your trip to mid-December, you’ll save.
This year, the ski industry is contending with a “snow hangover” generated by last year’s dry conditions in the West, depressing early season bookings amid the uncertainty of this year’s El Nino weather pattern.
“It seems people are hedging their snow bets to give it a bit of time to fill in,” said Cat Iwanchuk, the vice president of business development at Ski.com, a mountain travel agency.
She identified Canadian resorts like Banff and Lake Louise as popular for greater “snow security” and a good exchange rate (the U.S. dollar is worth 1.40 Canadian dollars).
Prices for Caribbean cruises in December are down 8 percent year over year, according to Cruise Critic, a review and booking site, which it attributes to the growth in capacity in the region. The site recently published a seven-night Holland America cruise deal from Fort Lauderdale leaving Dec. 19 starting at $699 a person.
Timeshare companies note that travelers can save by preparing meals in their rentals. GoTimesharing is offering 20 percent off rentals in resorts from Vermont to Hawaii on bookings made until Dec. 15 (use the promo code HomeAwayFromHome).
5. Go Somewhere Else for ‘Festive Season’
Many travelers book extended vacations between Christmas and New Year’s Day — the period that the industry calls “festive season,” when demand and rates spike.
“At top ski and beach properties, availability is already tight,” said Lucie Kittel, the founder of Domino Travel, based in Samford, Conn.
Contributing to higher costs, many resorts impose minimum stays of five or more nights during the holidays. Ms. Kittel recommends destinations in Asia for value.
“Bangkok, for example, can be surprisingly reasonable over Christmas, while places like Zermatt and Courchevel command a significant premium that week,” she said, naming popular European ski resorts.
In the third quarter, searches for North American travel over Christmas on Expedia were up 5 percent, with the largest gains among less-obvious destinations such as Quebec City and San Pedro Sula in Honduras.
“Demand is not disappearing; it is redistributing,” Melanie Fish, the vice president of global public relations at Expedia Group Brands, wrote in an email.
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