Give up the dream of a holiday deal

FOR anyone waiting to get a great airfare or a travel deal for the year-end holidays, here’s the ultimate advice from the experts: Don’t wait. Book now. Availability is shrinking and prices are going up, not down.

And although Thanksgiving is fast approaching, you can still find seats, but success is unlikely on Nov. 23, the day before, or Nov. 27, the Sunday after.

Once again, the holiday travel landscape is changing. What was true for travel in those lean days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks isn’t true anymore.

“If you look at 2001-2002, we had a recession going on and we had 9/11 fallout,” said Phil Carpenter, vice president/corporate marketing for travel search engine SideStep. “We had slow business and leisure travel because everyone felt he should mind his pennies and stay put.

“As a result, the travel suppliers had a lot of extra inventory, and they were making a lot of deals available at the last minute to try to fill planes and hotel rooms.

“But things have changed,” he said. “The economy is doing better. We’ve seen leisure travel come back with a vengeance, given the fact that people had a lot of pent-up demand.”

Sensing that shift in the terrain, shrewd travelers, knowing precisely where they want to go during the holidays, booked early and snapped up good fares, according to online booking companies such as Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz, Cheapfares and SideStep.

“People have been pretty savvy this year,” said Amy Ziff, spokeswoman for Travelocity. “We’ve seen record-breaking holiday weekends all year, and we use that as a precursor of what Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s will be. We’ve been predicting a busy season, so people have been booking very early.”

As fuel costs have increased and cash-strapped airlines have shrunk their schedules wherever possible to save money, fewer seats are available, Ziff said. To pay for fuel, she said, the airlines have increased fares, but even so, people are still buying. “This isn’t the best year for waiting until the last minute.”

According to Ziff’s research, bookings are 6% to 7% ahead of where they were a year ago. For Christmas and New Year’s, fares are 15% to 20% higher, she said.

Blame it on tradition, one expert said.

“What’s happening this year is that we’re going back to the traditional booking patterns,” said Terry Trippler, airline analyst for Cheapfares.com.

“Many people started to book early, and they took up all the cheap fares,” he said. “Now people are saying, ‘Oh, my goodness, [the fare’s] more than it was last year.’ Well, it’s not necessarily that the airlines raised their prices, which they have, but not that much. It’s that the less expensive fares have been taken by the early bookers.

“If the higher fares don’t sell, they’ll be reduced. One way or another, the airline will fill those planes.” But he said, “Nobody’s going to be left at home if they want to go.”

If the fare -- either the price or the availability -- is an obstacle, you may need to pull out all the stops. Check with a travel agent, who has resources you do not. Or, if you want to invest the time to search on your own, look for a fare to or from an alternate airport.

For Southern Californians, that may mean flying out of Ontario or Burbank instead of LAX. For the destination, look into arriving at, say, Providence, R.I., or Hartford, Conn., instead of flying into Boston.

You also can turn to the booking tools on the airline sites that let you compare prices for different days.

Katie Deines, spokeswoman for Expedia, suggests would-be travelers check out Expedia’s Fare Compare calendar and consider Thanksgiving holiday flights that depart on Tuesday and a return on Saturday for the least expensive fares.

Christmas is a different story, she said. People often are looking for warm-weather family vacations -- Florida, Mexico and Hawaii -- or skiing and cruising vacations.

The usual Christmas and New Year’s holidays are even busier this year because Hanukkah and Kwanzaa (Dec. 26) coincide with them, said Carpenter of SideStep. “That makes the demand not only for flights, but hotels and rental cars all happen at the same time. It’s a perfect storm this year.”

Here are some suggestions for making sure your holiday plans get off the ground:

* Get your flights now. Don’t think prices are going to go down, because they probably won’t.

* If you need a hotel room, reserve as early as possible. The desirable hotels fill up, so you’ll need to pick a place or you could be left out in the cold.

* Reserve rental cars too. Don’t wait till the last minute, particularly if you want a minivan. Although travelers have been trained to book air first, hotel second and rental car third, or as an afterthought, the vehicles many want, such as a minivan, and the good deals get snapped up quickly.

For travelers looking to cruise at Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Year’s, well, it’s kind of potluck.

“There’s a little space on some cruise lines, but not a lot,” said Nancy Kelly, president of Oak Brook, Ill.-based Kelly Cruises. “Thanksgiving is not out of the question, but space will be sparse and spotty. There’s probably more space at Christmas than New Year’s, but it’s going to vary from cruise line to cruise line and ship to ship. There’s a stateroom here, a stateroom there on some lines.

“Some premium lines, be it Princess, Holland America or Celebrity, have some spotty availability for Christmas and New Year’s. But it’s not the situation where people can call up and say, ‘I want Christmas, I want this ship, I want a balcony, I want to be midship.’ Sorry. Gone.”

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Travel Insider welcomes comments but can’t respond individually to letters and calls. Write to Travel Insider, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A., CA 90012, or e-mail travel@latimes.com.

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Brace for crowds

Here is a list of the expected busiest airports for the holidays though the end of the year, according to Orbitz. These were derived from October bookings made before Hurricane Wilma, which struck Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and parts of Florida:

Domestic

Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson

Boston’s Logan

Chicago O’Hare

Dallas-Fort Worth

Denver

Las Vegas

Los Angeles

Miami

New York’s LaGuardia

Orlando, Fla.

Phoenix

International

Cancun, Mexico (suffered extensive damage from Hurricane Wilma)

London’s Heathrow

Los Cabos, Mexico

Mexico City

Montego Bay’s Sangster, Jamaica

Nassau, Bahamas

Paris’ Charles de Gaulle

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci (Fiumicino)

Source: Orbitz Insider Index