This Site Shows the Cheapest Vacation Days in Popular Cities.
Over the past two years, two of my close friends have gone on vacation for one or two weeks to Italy in three. On the surface, their many vacations in Europe gave the impression that they must have suddenly amassed a ton of money. As it turns out, everything was during the trip: in the off-season.
While trips to Florence and Rome could potentially number in the thousands, they began booking travel packages with Expedia, which only cost a few hundred trips. I was very impressed and in March my boyfriend and I joined them in Florence. It was amazing.
Depending on where you travel, there is a reason why people travel there during the “off” and “peak” seasons. The weather is generally better during the high season and tours are easier for you to find. However, off-season travel can also have benefits. During our trip to Florence, our tour groups consisted of a handful of people, the streets were easy to navigate so we could really enjoy them and we could literally just wander through museums and churches and walk right inside. Unlike friends who went to town a few months later, they reported spending hours in lines that didn’t exist for us, and had to deal with crowds of people at every attraction, train station and restaurant. Yes, it was a little chilly while we were there, but I think we won.
If you want somewhere to go in the off season, you can help a new site Offpeak.io . The app analyzes the average hotel prices over the course of the year to determine what “off-season” might be for the location. You can then use this information to plan your trip.
In addition, it takes into account the events in the city that can lead to increased costs or overcrowding, and lets you know what it is. For example, Salesforce will host its annual Dreamforce conference next month in San Francisco. You can see where it is from the huge peak in the graph below.
If I were planning a typical family vacation in the city, then I could use this knowledge to plan a trip a week (or even a few days) later, when hotels become more affordable and cost a quarter less.
You can sort the information by the hotel’s star rating and view up to 11 months in advance. You’d still probably want to do a little more research before booking (are hotels in Boston that cheap because the city is usually covered in snow this week?) So you know what you’re getting into. The site also lists the usually high / low temperatures for each day, so you can use the charts to find the perfect combination of weather and price.