Discounts and bargains for early booking

When the wild geese migrate south, wanderlust sets in. This can be satisfied wonderfully by already planning the next big trip for 2023. Late autumn is the best season for this.

It was an old family recipe in our house. To bridge the winter months with the anticipation of the holidays, to have the widest choice of flight connections and accommodation, to take discounts with you.

For this, holiday catalogs weighing several kilos were lugged home by all sorts of organizers in November. We children dog-eared the pages about dream trips to Tahiti or Hawaii, which unfortunately was never taken into account. The lowest common denominator was the Mediterranean Sea.

My father spent many evenings studying the enclosed prize pieces, smoking his pipe. Discounts were circled with a ballpoint pen, bargains marked with an exclamation mark, fixed children's prices and 14-for-11-night offers were checked to see whether they could be combined. He obviously enjoyed this arithmetic acrobatics and it was part of the travel ritual. It was time-consuming, but it paid off: the money saved was then spent in restaurants and shops at the holiday destination.

Even today, timing is everything. Strictly speaking, the advantage of booking early has not changed much since then. Instead of catalogs on the table, a dozen online travel sites are now open on the screen. It is just as time-consuming to calculate, meticulously compare and save a lot. Because: Many tour operators have already activated the holiday offers for the coming year.

At TUI, for example, the discount code is called “Early300”, at FTI and Dertour there are “super early booking campaigns” and vouchers; Airtours is offering luxury hotels in Dubai and Thailand at 15 percent less if booked by the end of November. The travel comparison portal Urlaubsguru has even put together a good 100 early booking offers for the summer of 2023 from all tour operators, from New York to Cyprus, under the age-old slogan: “Professionals book their holidays in November.”

It is also worth booking early for flight tickets. The travel portal Expedia has found in the new “Air Travel Hacks Report” that the ticket prices for international flights are often cheapest 150 days before departure. You can save an average of ten percent by booking a flight six months before you travel. When flying off, you should experiment with the test booking, according to Expedia: Travelers who take off on Fridays instead of the usual weekend can save up to 40 percent on long-distance flights.

It is also worth taking a look at the 2023 summer flight schedules of various airlines. Especially when it comes to newly added destinations, one can assume that the airlines want to get their planes full at all costs. That pushes the ticket costs down.

For example, from May Condor will fly from Frankfurt to Edmonton in Canada for the first time, and TUIfly to Dakar in Senegal; United and Delta are increasing their transatlantic flights, for example between Berlin and Washington D.C. or between Düsseldorf and Atlanta. These are not wild goose flight routes, but perfect for satisfying wanderlust.