Expedia CEO Encourages Travelers to Book Holiday Travel Now As Prices Will 'Continue to Be High'

Expedia CEO Peter Kern caught up with T+L to talk all things fall and holiday travel — and why you should start planning now.

The last days of summer may still feel like they’re lingering, but the time to start thinking about holiday flights is now.

That’s according to Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern, who told Travel + Leisure booking trends have largely returned to pre-pandemic norms.

“There's a lot of opportunity in the fall for travelers who can travel, but we have gone back to back-to-school patterns, back-to-work patterns. And so we're starting to see more normal seasonality,” Kern told T+L, adding, “As we go into the fall, I think we'll see a relatively normal shoulder season — still with high post-pandemic demand — but a relatively normal seasonal change… that's created some pricing relief and some other opportunities.”

He added: “It's a carryover from a robust summer… [and] we expect through the holidays and beyond.”

While fall is looking very popular — flight searches are up 15 percent compared to the same season last year and hotel searches are up 20 percent — prices have come down a bit from the very busy and even historic summer travel season. In fact, domestic flights will cost travelers 10 percent less compared to the peak summer months and international prices have fallen 5 percent.

But that doesn’t necessarily hold for the upcoming holidays of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s.

“Prices for the holidays are still expensive, the opportunities lie in the in-between period,” Kern said. “I think demand and pricing for the holidays will continue to be high — very high.”

Travelers hoping to book a flight for one of those big fall or winter holidays should start tracking and thinking about booking now. Typically, Kern said travelers want to book domestic flights at least 30 days in advance and the earlier the better for international flights.

The biggest savings come from being flexible, Expedia noted, while the most expensive days to fly would be the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the Friday before Christmas.

“As things become more compressed and you’re down to… the last few seats — the last few anything — prices can get pretty extreme,” Kern said.

Expedia Group, which recently launched its One Key loyalty program to unify its brands Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo, is also updating its in-app technology to make trip planning easier. The company is introducing a host of new initiatives for the end of this year, including making it easier for groups to plan vacations on any of the brand’s three sites with an improved “trip planner” that allows multiple people to like, comment, and save ideas to a created trip.

The company will also build on the in-app artificial intelligence bot it introduced earlier this year by enabling AI-powered conversations to help travelers pick their ideal neighborhood when traveling.

“The technology under all of this is really robust,” the company’s Chief Technology Officer Rathi Murthy told T+L. “[We’re] bringing a whole bunch of tools — smarter tools — taking advantage of the data, and also enabling this whole conversation throughout our journey to help our travelers remove friction across the board.”

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