‘Tis the season for planning holiday travel

While it may seem early, many people have already started planning trips for the upcoming holiday season. To help you save money and confidently book holiday travel, we’re sharing holiday price trends, tips and a few new tools from Google Flights and Hotel Search.

With the help of the Google News Lab and Polygraph, we created a handy tool that shows how prices change—based on when you book and where you’re traveling—for flights to popular holiday destinations. It’ll even help you find hotel deals for Thanksgiving, December holidays and New Years.

If saving money is your goal, take a day or two off at the start of the week after Thanksgiving; many routes have lower than average prices with a return on Tuesday, November 27th or Wednesday, November 28th.

If you’re planning to go on vacation, we’ll also show you what destinations have unusually low hotel prices during these holidays. As you browse hotel destinations, we’ll show you some of the most popular things to do when you get to your destination, based on the activities that others have saved in Google Search and Maps. 

See how your Thanksgiving flight price stacks up  

For Thanksgiving this year, we’re showing a new tip when you search in Google Flights on your phone. It shows you whether the price you’re seeing for a given flight is a “good” price—that is, is it unusually low, is it typical, or is it high—based on historical prices and prices available so far this year.

Find good flight deals in the Explore Map  

We’ve also added new ways to find great deals in the Explore Map in Google Flights. If you’re flexible on your travel location or dates for an end-of-year getaway, you can search for destinations like “Southern Europe,” then choose either specific or flexible dates. Google Flights searches through thousands of possible destinations, analyzes their historical flight prices and then highlights cities with good deals in green.

Check hotel price trends and comparisons

Hotel room rates can also fluctuate, especially when rooms are selling out fast for holidays like New Year’s Eve. We’re adding Price Insights for Hotels, which lets you see how prices evolve over time for the dates of your trip.

Say you’re looking to stay at a hotel in San Diego on Christmas. You can now explore that hotel’s historical prices, if it’s lower or higher than usual, and compare that price to other hotels in the same destination within a similar price range--and of the same star rating-- during the same time period.

It may be August, but if you  start booking your holiday travel plans by mid-September, you’ll be giving yourself the best holiday gift of all—a little extra cash.