Does the cost of flights around Easter make your eyes water? You are not alone. Prices are astronomical, and you can blame it on one thing: the school holidays. The short-term inflation levied against families with school-age children is nothing new, but it certainly feels as though travel companies are increasingly guilty of extortionate pricing as the cost of travelling by air rises — often by three times as much. It’s a school holiday triple surge.
Take flights from London to the Greek island of Crete, for example. A search on the flight-comparison website Skyscanner revealed that for departures on May 24 — the Saturday marking the start of half-term for many UK schools — and returns a week later you’ll have to pay upwards of £800pp. That’s the cheapest option, whether you are flying into Chania or Heraklion, and includes only a personal bag plus carry-on case with budget-airline size and weight restrictions. No doubt by the time you are reading this it will have gone up again. In contrast a return flight on the same route with the same luggage restrictions but departing two weeks before half-term, on Saturday, May 10, costs less than £300pp.
Crete isn’t the only destination affected by such surge pricing of course. We looked at the cost of return flights from London to four other popular holiday hotspots — Mallorca, Istanbul, Bangkok and New York City — and the results showed that prices varied substantially across the board, in some cases doubling compared with two weeks before and tripling in comparison with low season (see table and our methodology below). The good news is that savings are possible, and there are a few ways to do it.
A flight to Crete two weeks before half-term currently costs £500 less per person
Based on our research, short-haul and mid-haul destinations experience the worst of the price surge. Airfares for Crete, Mallorca and Istanbul are two to three times higher during half-term compared with the weeks before. The surge is smaller during the summer, perhaps because travel dates are more spread out. Meanwhile, the long-haul destinations of Bangkok and New York are relatively unaffected by the school holiday inflation, even during half-term, especially if you book further in advance.
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The most obvious solution here is to go long-haul during half-term if you want to save on flights. Yes, you will spend more time in the air, and have less time in the destination if you are restricted to a week, but with savings adding up to a few hundred pounds for a family of four it could be more than worth it.
A destination swap, or “dupe”, might be a good alternative. Instead of going to Crete, for example, you might head to Rhodes, to where return flights for the same May half-term dates start from £497pp, and the beaches are no less lovely.
Rhodes’s beaches are just as lovely as Crete’s
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For Mallorca, only the Spanish mainland is cheaper — try Madrid, to where return flights start from £218pp for May half-term, and you can enjoy a city full of culture, with day trips to the mountains and rural villages around Segovia. Trains to Barcelona from Madrid start from a little over £6 each way, so a twin-city break plus a couple of days at a Costa Brava beach resort is very doable.
Bangkok can be swapped with the equally intriguing Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur — return flights for May half-term start from £667pp and you can use it as a jumping-off point for the region’s tropical beaches.
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As for Istanbul, look to the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, where you still get the east-meets-west vibe, with mosques and churches competing with architectural splendour; return flights for May half-term start from £169pp.
You will struggle to find good alternatives to New York that offer cheaper direct flights, though — economy flights on this route are heavily subsidised by business travel and the number of airlines competing for a share of the premium market means that the city is one of the most affordable gateway cities to North America.
If you have your heart set on a specific short-haul or mid-haul destination you can make a saving by tweaking when, how and where you travel.
The flights we checked are Saturday departures for ease of comparison, but flying on a Sunday can make the trip a lot cheaper. When we changed the dates for our Crete flight to May 25 and June 1 the price dropped from £864pp to £477pp.
Kuala Lumpur bears many similarities with Bangkok
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There are also significant savings to be made if you are happy to take a connecting flight instead of going direct, even on short-haul routes. Keeping the departure date as May 24, we found that you could get a return Crete flight for £431pp, though admittedly you might lose a day to travelling, depending on the route you choose.
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There are two other ways you can save, but they are a little more tricky and don’t always yield results.
The first is to combine one-way flights from different airlines. This is a no-brainer for short-haul flights on budget airlines, but can end up being more expensive on mid-haul and long-haul routes. The issue we found was that in some cases, although more affordable combinations were shown on flight-comparison websites, often you had to book the two legs on separate websites where the prices didn’t always match up. Searching separately could be extremely time-consuming and the savings, we found, weren’t always worth the hassle.
You might also consider departing from and returning to different airports. Naturally it’s a little easier to do this if you live in London. But if there’s only one airport near you or you have airport parking to consider, the savings are rarely worth it.
Ultimately, though, the more flexible you are the more you’ll save. You’ll still pay extra during the school holidays, but it needn’t break the bank.
How we got our data
We used Skyscanner as our starting point then followed the links through to the final booking site to check that the fares were bookable and correct. London was picked as the departure point as it had the most flight connections, and we only included direct flights that took off and returned to the same airport.
For each of the five destinations we looked for the cheapest return flights. Checked luggage was optional, but a minimum carry-on allowance of 8kg was required, with baggage fees factored into the overall cost.
The departure dates we picked for comparison were two weeks before May half-term (May 10), the start of May half-term (May 24), three weeks before the school summer holidays (July 5), the start of the school summer holidays (July 26), two weeks before October half-term (October 4), the start of October half-term (October 25), and an off-peak travel date (November 15). Schools around the UK have slightly different holiday dates so we went with the more popular dates. All the flights departed on a Saturday and returned the following Saturday.
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