The United States has acquired yet another “national day” – National Cheap Flight Day, which falls on 23 August. It was introduced by the online travel agency CheapOair after it analysed booking statistics showing that it is towards the end of August that air fares start to drop noticeably.
According to CheapOair, by mid-August domestic flights in the US on average become roughly 33% cheaper than they were on 1 June, while international flights fall by around 10%. The reason is simple: the school holidays come to an end, families return from their summer breaks, demand drops, and airlines cut fares to fill their planes.
At the same time, experts stress that 23 August is not a one-off “sale day”. Rather, this date marks the start of a period when ticket prices gradually decline. For domestic US routes, reductions of 25–40% from summer peaks are usually seen from mid-September to the end of October, with the very best fares typically available between 8 September and 24 October.
For flights to Europe, the fall in prices after Labor Day in the US is even more pronounced: on some routes it reaches 30–50% compared with August. Analysts at the Hopper service note that booking trips to Europe for the first two weekends of November can save around 27% on summer fares. However, as Thanksgiving approaches, demand rises again and prices start climbing towards the holiday peak.
The optimal booking window for autumn domestic flights in the US, based on the data cited, is 21–60 days before departure. The cheapest weeks to travel are early and mid-September and early October, before fares begin to rise again in the run-up to Thanksgiving. For Europe, October and the first half of November are considered good value, when there are fewer tourists but the weather is still favourable.
The Caribbean has its own particularities: autumn there coincides with the hurricane season, which lasts until November. Because of this, late September and October can offer attractive prices, but with increased weather-related risk. Those who value predictability are advised to plan trips from 1 November onwards.
Specialists recommend not treating National Cheap Flight Day as a single day of discounts, but using it as a signal to start tracking fares more actively at the end of August and to book by the end of October. To do this, they suggest setting up price alerts on specialist services and monitoring price movements using tools such as Google Flights, which show whether the current fare is typical, above or below the usual level for a given route.
Experts also point out that this period is convenient not only for finding cheaper autumn tickets, but also for booking Thanksgiving and Christmas flights early, before demand has surged. Thus, although National Cheap Flight Day is a marketing initiative, it does reflect a real seasonal trend towards cheaper air travel at the end of summer and in autumn.