How to Book a Last Minute President's Day Weekend Trip!

I am a big fan of utilizing every company wide holiday to get away and explore somewhere new. And while it’s a good rule of thumb to purchase domestic flights at least 4 weeks before or International flights at least 6 weeks before, there are also deals pretty much anytime as long as you are very flexible on your final destination. (Notable exception is Christmas/New Years when deals are much harder to come by)

But for the purposes of this article, I want to help you find somewhere to go for President’s Day. President’s Day is a great time to travel. Not everyone has it off, but if you are one of the lucky offices that does—woohoo!

The first thing I do when I want to try to find a last minute deal is go to Google.com/flights. I will plug my home airport and the dates (for now let’s pretend we only want to be gone Friday-Monday.). Leave the destination blank and hit SEARCH.

Then a page will pull up that looks like the below - showing you a map of the the destinations around the country/world that you can go to with the prices. You can drag around the world to see prices to all over.

You can add additional filters to your search by specifying the number of stops, specific airlines, times (departure/return), bags included, and duration. (These are found at the top of the screen on the map)

If you have a few more days to spare, maybe even look at taking an international trip around this time - utilizing that extra day off work to elongate your trip / take less vacation time.

For example, you could search for a flight leaving Fri, Feb 14th (after 5PM so you don't have to miss work) and returning Sun, Feb 23rd. This would give you a 10 day trip, while only missing 4 days fo work.

Alternatively, you could also leave Fri, Feb 7th (after 5PM so you don’t have to miss work) and return Mon, Feb 17th. This would give you an 11 day trip, while only missing 5 days / 1 week of work.

A great last minute resource to find hotels is HotelTonight - the more last minute, the better the deals generally are. OR you can use a site like Hotwire that doesn’t tell you the name of the hotel but gives you the location, number of stars, and amenities. Once you book the exact hotel is revealed. It’s kind of a fun game, and the deals are usually quite good!

Well I hope this walk thru & tips were helpful. Now go get that President’s Weekend trip booked!!!

xoxo

Lauren