I was pulling some price data for historical holiday travel this weekend whilst watching my beloved Dallas Cowboys (the wonders of a laptop, wi-fi and hi-def) and thought I would share some interesting things I found while perusing the information related to holiday travel prices. As many of you who follow this blog are aware, the legacy airlines have increased airfare 8 times since labor day weekend (a few times for the lower cost airlines and probably at least 1-more price increase before the end of the year). But, in the midst of these increases, both legacy and lower-cost airlines have also fired out off-peak holiday travel sales; however, these are only for “very flexible” travelers (cheap flights, yes, but during times and days you normally wouldn’t want to travel) and we should note, these off-peak fares are available only in limited city-pairs.

Holidays are a special time for airlines: they include some of the busiest travel days of the year (and most expensive for the passengers), but because of the seasonal nature of the industry, these can also be some of the slowest and least expensive times to fly. This year, though, demand looked pretty firm for October, with numbers hovering at the 80% range for U.S. Domestic flight load factors, so it’s probably a safe bet that November and December will be firm compared to previous years.

My analysis started with our U.S. domestic historical airfare database contains over 2 billion-records, broken down by the following:

• city pair
• airline
• advance purchase
• date/time of airfare distribution (3 a day on weekdays for domestic)
• cheapest price (the airlines sometimes have more than one price by this breakdown)
• distance

I decided to do a quick analysis of airfare prices between the top 50-cities by passengers enplaned last year (actually 46 since I excluded 4-Canadian cities for this rollup), and pull some benchmark numbers as well as analyze the past 4-years of holiday airfare data.

I averaged all 2+ billion records by each month and came up with the following overall benchmark numbers (for these top 46-cities) over the past 37-months.

• $329 Average cheapest leisure price (roundtrip - 14-day advance purchase or more)
• $621 Average cheapest business price (roundtrip less than 7 days advance purchase)

From this data I also pulled a chart for the average cheapest prices for the months of October and November, for the past four years broken down by distance of trip (short, mid and long haul):

All averages are based on the roundtrip price between the top-46 cities with a roundtrip distance of more than 600-miles, and the average cheapest price on each day during the month with a 14-day or more advance purchase requirement (leisure airfare).

At first glance it appears that 2005 didn’t have much of a holiday sale (if any) and in the long run, 2007 may have some built-in “Virgin America Effect” on long haul routes — since they changed the transcontinental price point into the mid to high $200 range. I’ll continue to post some geek data as it hits me. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, I would be happy to hear from you.

I should note that using averages isn’t really best choice to show side by side comparisons, because outliers (like airlines that file high prices and don’t care if they ever fly a connecting route) can skew the average and certainly any given city pair can vary wildly. For the purposes of this look though you should note a few dollars difference can mean a great deal overall when taking the average of such a large number of records.