Actually, there is a perfect time to go on your vacation. Our Best Time to Travel tool uses your origin, destination and length of trip to determine when you should travel and when to book for a great price. Start by filling in your travel details, and we'll take it from there.
Our recommendation on which month to travel is calculated based on the presented four factors: average flight prices, popularity, average temperature, and average precipitation. Flight prices, popularity, and precipitation constitute inverse factors, the less the better. Average temperature optimal values are taken as the median for the destination, and a difference is calculated for each month from this reference point. The smaller the difference the higher the month moves in the recommendation. Flight prices and temperature factors are weighed double as much as popularity and precipitation. December is excluded due to ambiguous price and popularity patterns around Christmas travel. In case of unavailable data for any of the aforementioned factors, the recommendation is estimated based on the rest of the available factors.
Prices are estimates based on analysis of current and historical minimum roundtrip prices for one traveler. Prices include monthly averages as well as the greatest and least percentages in intervals of ten for each trip length. With our data, we try to forecast future minimum price trends - these estimates are subject to change and should be interpreted as a rough directional guide.
Overall insights for hotel prices are based on our own search data from the past 3 - 4 days and insights can be updated once a day. To estimate nightly rates for a standard double-room at 3-star hotels, we show the pricing range excluding the top 10% and bottom 10% of prices for a given destination. If there are missing insights, that means that we don't have enough data from the past 3 - 4 days on the given destination to provide a reliable estimate.
Monthly crowd estimates for each destination are determined by internal flight and hotel search data. This includes most recent historical insights using a 9-month range which is updated on a monthly basis. This data is measured by considering the highest number of searches per month to represent the period with the most crowds.
Weather data is pulled from a third party site, Weatherbase, and has not been verified by KAYAK. Monthly average temperature and precipitation data is based on historical insights from the past 102 years. Weatherbase data is updated in realtime from the US Census Bureau and other databases worldwide.
Best time to book insights are estimated from our internal historical search data. Search data from the past year is aggregated for each day difference between date of departure and search date from 0 to 183 days (about 6 months ahead is the earliest we consider), taking the bottom 10 percentile of hotel prices and flight prices of economy class. The minimum prices and corresponding day difference is identified to approximate best times to book flight tickets for the specific route, and hotels for the specific destination city. The underlying dataset is updated weekly. In case of missing insights, the route or destination city in question have less than 40 data points per day difference, thus we cannot generate reliable estimates.