Travel Deal of the Day (May 20, 2008)

If you are looking to plan a last-minute Memorial Day weekend trip, I have two suggestions to help you find affordable travel options.

The Deal:
Use Smarter Travel and Last Minute to find last minute Memorial Day deals for this upcoming holiday weekend.

(1) Smarter Travel – Airlines usually publish last-minute fares at the beginning of the week for travel at the end of the week. Smarter Travel aggregates all of the last minute published airline, hotel and car rental rates and makes them easy to search. Since availability will be very limited for Memorial Day weekend, I would highly advocate searching for these fares as soon as possible as many flights over Memorial Day weekend will sell out by the end of the week. (Usually the airlines publish all last-minute fares for the following weekend by Wednesday morning - so, Wednesday morning is a good time to search for these fares.)

(2) Last Minute – Last Minute provides travel packages (air and hotel; air and car; hotel and car; and air, hotel and car) for travel booked within two weeks of departure. Last Minute can have great deals for holiday weekend travel as the package prices including airfare are often much lower than what you would find if you searched for published (standard) airfares. Given the amount of travel on Friday and Monday of Memorial Day weekend, I would advocate looking for a departure on Thursday (5/22) or Saturday (5/24) and a return on Sunday (5/25) or Tuesday (5/27) to save the most money and to find the best availability.

How:
Go to Smarter Travel and Last Minute.