Travel Hacks For A Cheaper Christmas Holiday
Looking for a way to get out of town for Christmas? For those who are a little flexible on their leave days, you can look to travel out way before Christmas to avoid the peak season and premium on your travel costs. For those who unfortunately only has a small window period for their holiday during Christmas, here’s some suggestion from us to help you cut some of the expensive travel costs you can expect.
The 8-week rule
An economist, Makoto Watanabe came up with the answer to calculate the optimum time to buy air tickets – 8 weeks. While we are less than a month away from Christmas, it shows the long-time adage that buying your air tickets early will save you money still holds true.
Flying on Christmas Day is not always cheaper
There are some who advocates flying on Christmas Day to save on flight costs but it may not hold true all the time. We used Skyscanner to check out some air fares out of Singapore and found the following results:
Singapore – Bali
From the above, you can see that it definitely makes more sense to fly on 23rd December, have a relaxing day and head out to party on Christmas Eve.
We also checked out fllights that were going to countries where Christmas is more widely celebrated and found that airfares on Scoot were all around $1,200 for 23 to 25 December while it was significantly cheaper on full service flights to fly on Christmas Day to Sydney but not to London.
Conclusion? It’s hard to come up with a formula to know when to get cheaper flight tickets. Our answer? Be flexible. Use a comparison site to give you a better idea of what kind of fares you can expect.
Use a Credit Card to book for your holidays
In the uncertainty of booking cheaper flights, use a credit card that gives you certainty of a discount with your bookings! For instance, the DBS Altitude card gives you 20% off return tickets on Air Asia if you book before 30 November and 15% off flights on Jet Airways. Or how about a $20 flight discount at Cheaptickets.sg? Or if you travel often, the ANZ Optimum World Mastercard lets you earn a 5% rebate on the category you choose. So if are someone who takes a holiday during December every year, simply choose the travel category by 25 September to activate the 5% rebate of your purchase category.
Other than getting cheaper tickets or earning rebates, there are also many credit cards that offer discounts with travel sites such as Agoda and Expedia. Check them out to maximise your savings!
Utilise your Air Miles
If you’ve been racking up the air mileage earnings on your credit cards, it’s time to use them before they expire! Some credit cards require you to pay a conversion fee to change the “points” you earn into miles of the airlines you want but if you have the Amex Krisflyer Gold card, you get to skip the fees and redeem the miles directly with Krisflyer online.
If you dont have a travel credit card in your wallet, nows the time to check out our shortlist of the best AirMiles and Travel credit cards in Singapore.
