Take More Vacations: How to Search Better, Book Cheaper, and Travel the World

The fundamental problem with retrospective studies is that they don’t have any predictive power. They’re building a model that overfits historical data too closely, rather than a model designed to forecast the future. You may as well look at last year’s stock market returns, find the day with the highest performance, and declare that that’s the bes

Being serendipitous does not mean booking last minute. That romantic idea of showing up at the airport and picking a destination from the big board is a surefire way of paying ten times more for airfare than your seatmate. Not only are last-minute flights almost always expensive, but as we’ll explore in Chapter 11, booking well in advance is superi

So while flying mail was quite profitable for airlines, carrying passengers wasn’t. Unlike passengers, mail doesn’t care about a comfortable seat or a reasonable cabin temperature or arriving on time. Brady estimated that by the late 1920s mail was six times more profitable to carry than passengers. Though some airlines did sell seats to the public

93 percent of travelers report feeling happier after a vacation than before. Few travelers regret the trips they took, and it’s understandable why: They return happier, healthier, and better off than when they left.

Over the past couple of decades, budget airlines have grown rapidly. According to Kasper and Lee, low-cost carriers like Spirit and Frontier “have captured nearly all of the growth in domestic demand since 2007.”

Here are some of the international destinations most likely to see flights from the United States under $500 roundtrip: North America: Domestic flights, as well as those to Mexico and Canada, have the cheapest fares on average. Caribbean: Some islands like Puerto Rico, Aruba, Curaçao, and Turks and Caicos regularly see cheap flights from the mainla

Fourth, and perhaps most fascinating: The more we venture out, the better we get at discerning what we hate and what we love about traveling so we can structure future trips accordingly.

By far the most difficult three months of the year to get cheap flights are (in ascending order of difficulty): June, August, and July. Summer is the most popular time of year to travel, for two primary reasons: great weather and school’s on break. Humans are fond of sunshine and warmth; many of us are inclined to get out when it’s nice out. For mi

With fares no longer set by a central board but determined instead by what airlines would sell and what travelers would pay, flying became significantly cheaper and more accessible for middle class Americans. New airlines popped up, including the first budget carriers, driving down the profitability of flying economy passengers. In response, airlin