Thanksgiving Flights: Visualizing Expensive Peaks

Our friends over at QL2 have the most amazing travel data: prices, providers, availability and more. Since the busiest travel days of the year are fast approaching, we decided to look at what's going on with Thanksgiving flight prices.

If you haven't bought your tickets yet, use this guide to figure out which days and airlines to fly. The data shows that flying off-peak by even one day, you can save about $500 in some markets.

To me, this data seems to be saying "don't fly on Wednesday and Sunday on Thanksgiving weekend." But if you can't avoid both days, note that you get hit with the highest prices when you come back on Sunday. Check out the NY JFK to SFO route to see how the price spikes much more on return date than on departure date.

It may be a recession, but that doesn't mean flying at Thanksgiving is cheap.

Check out our new Travel Trends site to see more.