As 2007 winds down, I thought it might be fun to do a little experimentation with our new “Best Time to Buy” database that will be rolling out early in 2008 and take a look at the price of travel on official U.S. Holidays. Certainly extra long weekends invite many to checkout airline ticket prices and as always I am intrigued to find which departure and destination cities are the best overall for travelers, so putting on the “Geek” cap on this morning I put together a ranking I would like to share…

For this experiment I mapped out the top 45 U.S. domestic cities (by passengers enplaning in those cities) to/from each other and took the average lowest price for travel over several upcoming official U.S. holidays (Presidents Day, Easter, Memorial Day and July 4th).

Our new “Best Time to Buy” database prices every week of the year, between every city, after every domestic airfare distribution (3 a day) and saves it historically.

For a given travel week this allows us to go back and pick the historical “perfect day” for purchasing between those cities on that travel day.

The number #1 question I always get:

When is the Best Time To Buy for Travel to “My Destination” on “This Date”?

This new database allows us to answer this question with more than just insider knowledge of the crazy world of airline pricing. Of course you’ll always want to sign up for our airfare email alerts in case the airlines break tradition (which they are want to do from time to time) and decide to put out an airfare sale that they haven’t done historically.

Airlines are creatures of habit, but they do react in weird and sometimes wonderful ways that no one can predict (for example the price of fuel and the current winter off-peak airfare sales).

A couple of things about the ranking chart shown below that caught my eye:

• I was surprised that the overall winner was Tampa Bay - not a hub city - but has Southwest Airlines - those traveling to or living in Tampa are big winners
• Pittsburgh in the top 3 was quite surprising as US Airways announced earlier this year a drastic reduction in flights which I would have guessed would have negatively impacted prices (but hasn’t)
• Continental and Delta hub cities were some of the most expensive — with Cincinnati “winning” the “most expensive” lower 48-state city followed closely by Northwest Airlines hub city Memphis

The following table shows the average cheapest prices fro travel between (from/to) that city and the 45 other cities on the Holiday weekend noted (Presidents Day, Easter, Memorial, July 4th). Each date is ranked from 1 to 45 by price and the overall rank is the sum of each holiday rank. The list is ordered by best overall rank.