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Four 'Secret' Times to Travel
Power Trip · May 2, 2003

When is the perfect time to travel - when prices are low, there are no crowds and everyone gives you the individual attention you deserve?

I'm not talking about the traditional "low" season, like summertime in the tropics, when hotels are shuttered, stores are closed and temperatures soar. Of course, those are excellent times to travel - as long as you don't mind living with Category Four hurricanes and cigar-sized insects.

No, what I mean are the times when, simply, fewer people are on the road. We already know about the busy times. The travel industry is more than open about the fact that the Fourth of July, Labor Day weekend, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas can get a little crazy.

But it's less than forthcoming about the "off" times, when people travel less. And for good reason: If we found out about these secret "off" times, we might deliberately plan a trip then, in order to get the best service and the lowest prices.

Apparently, hotels and airlines want us to believe that they're either fully booked or overbooked, all the time. Right. Guess they won't care for this list of slow times, but here it is:

The spring break slump. There's usually a significant drop-off in travel right after spring break and the Easter holiday. Everyone returns to work en masse, leaving hotels and flights emptier. It's a little trickier to nail this lull down, since Easter and spring vacation times are different every year. Jeff Weiner, a management consultant in Minneapolis, tries to time his flights for the week after Easter. Once, he remembers asking for upgrades on a transatlantic flight, to the upper deck of a Boeing 747. After hesitating for a second, the agent complied. "When the flight took off, there were five of us up top - the three of us and the two cabin crew looking after us," he says. "Definitely the way to go, if possible."

The fall drop-off. The week after Labor Day, in particular, is another back-to-work week, when people tend to travel less. In fact, the fall can be a slow time for many parts of the travel industry, because leisure travelers stay home and either work or go to school. Just take a look at the number of passengers carried by U.S. airlines this time of year to get an idea of the drop-off: In August 2002, slightly more than 50 million passengers were transported; the next month, the number dropped to about 39 million travelers. Most of my travel-savvy colleagues plan their trips during September. But even some business travelers like Trica Jean-Baptiste know that early fall is a great time to hit the road. Jean-Baptiste, a public-relations consultant in New York, heads down to South Carolina after the crowds have gone. "Sometimes, it feels like we're the only ones there," she says.

The Turkey Day lull. True, travel tapers off a little between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I wasn't aware of the post-holiday skid until a colleague pointed it out. In his excellent column on the Independent Traveler.com Web site, Ed Hewitt suggested that the week after Thanksgiving was another "dead week," when "planes and trains are empty, hotels are like abandoned houses, car rental lots are full of unused vehicles and rates are low, low, low." It's almost enough to make you want to postpone your Thanksgiving holiday by a week so that you can enjoy the low rates and lack of crowds. Kate Schwarz, a consultant from Fairfax, Va., says planning her travel during the Turkey Day lull "guarantees open seats, minimal wait times and courteous treatment. Driving during these weeks or days allows you to fly through toll booths. Even the autobahn of the east coast, I-95, is a breeze."

Classic dead week. The first week of the new year is always one of the slowest - if not the slowest - in the travel business. I call it the "classic" dead week because it's an across-the-board slow period. The average plane flies less than two-thirds full in January, according to the Air Transport Association, an industry trade group for the U.S. airline business. Hotel occupancies plummet, too. There are even bargains to be had at ski resorts (peak season often doesn't really get under way until late January). Judi Abbott, an apartment manager in Sanbornton, N.H., recalls a recent early January flight from Boston to London. "The plane was half-full," she says. "In economy class, all of us were able to stretch out across at least three seats and sleep."

Business travelers often have no control over when they have to hit the road, of course. But sometimes you can plan ahead - say, for a conference or a business meeting. That's when this list of secret "off" times will come in handy. Aim for them and you'll almost certainly save money and have the place to yourself.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Key Largo, Fla. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.