169. Flights Are Up 25%: Try These Luxury Travel Alternatives

Holiday flights are up 25%—but that doesn’t mean luxury travel is off the table. In this episode, I break down why booking early matters, which holiday trips still deliver real value, and how cruises, theme parks, and domestic escapes can help you travel well without overspending. Listen now to learn which luxury holiday trips still make sense—and why booking early could save you hundreds.

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Welcome to Jet Setting With Me, a weekly podcast about all things luxury travel. I'm Michelle, your extra AF hostess. In this podcast, you'll discover luxury travel hacks to maximize your precious travel time and resources. We'll dive into which destinations and experiences are worth your effort. And you'll get to travel vicariously with me on my own trips. So grab your bevy of choice and join me for a quick coffee chat. Gilmore Girl style. Hello, jet setters, and welcome back to another episode of Jet Setting with Me. It is I, Michelle, your friendly Wanderlust Instigator. Today we are talking about a sort of depressing topic. It's the quiet math of December, the deadline to book, Reader's Digest version, that would be now, and the trips that will still make sense since flights are up 25% more than last year. Pour something to cold or a hot beverage if you prefer. This episode rewards your attention. Now I know it is only August, and you're probably right in the thick of back to school, or like me, since my kids are past that, the increase in the ever-ending traffic to get from point A to point B, and ordering honey for Rosh Hashanah, which is next month. But 'tis the season. That's right. You've heard of Christmas in July. Well, from now on, that's your reminder. It is time to think about holiday plans. Here at the Jet Setting with Me household, we are actually in the thick of deciding. We have choices family Thanksgiving or a cruise. Since Thanksgiving is our wedding anniversary, that would be just for the two of us. I won that free celebrity cruise, so we're looking at maybe doing that for New Year's Eve, and it would take us to Key West, which surprise, I've never been to. I feel like it's really high time that I go and see the Hemingway House. And on any other year, we'd probably have trouble getting our cabin of choice. But on a cruise that goes out of US ports, this year we're right on time because people are waiting to see what's gonna happen in the world situation, which means you can be right on time too. Let's start with the real data. Airline fares, they've climbed 20.7% year over year. Now that's according to true government data, but here's the real stat: they've grown a full 27%, if you round up, by May. So for those of you like me who are not math people, I had my AI spell out the math, and that's a 22 rounding up surge in airline prices in just four months. The causes are truly structural. There's nothing we can do about it, but jet fuel has been repriced. And surprise, since your gas fuel is higher, so is jet fuel higher for the airlines to purchase. We talked in length previously about how Spirit's exit was gonna thin the domestic competition and how that allowed other quote-unquote discount airlines, Southwest, I'm looking at you, to raise their prices and routes where Spirit no longer exists. Aircraft availability, it's tight. Lots and lots of routes have been canceled because flights weren't full because of the pricing. And so instead of sending out half empty planes, they're just canceling those routes. Now, United's executive Scott Kirby has actually said that the airlines, because of that tight availability for planes, they expect to keep roughly 80% of those increases long term, but that still means that once the situation about jet fuel is resolved, they're gonna come down about 20%. That's a yay for us. Another travel stat to keep in mind, I did say at the beginning, this was kind of a depressing topic. Our lodging costs are higher, our food costs are higher. So when we're gone and we're eating out, or even when we're buying groceries, if we have a kitchen, that's still higher food costs, the same thing you're seeing at home right now. That makes overall travel costs 11% higher than a year ago at this time. I'm sorry. So, what's the strategy when we still want to get away for a change of scenery to reset for the new year ahead, or we want to visit with our out-of-town family over the holidays, or we want to have quality family time with one another on a trip? Well, the strategy reduces the overall costs of said trip. My recommendations for that stay domestic and cruise out of a domestic port. Now, I talked all about why I wasn't recommending trips to Europe, and most of it was because of airfare for this particular summer in episode 161. So you can go there and listen to that. But a recent cost of flights to Europe and premium economy, mind you, the skilled travel advisor in me really recommended waiting until next March when hopefully the cost of fuel will be lower. It was over $2,500 round trip. Cruises which go out of domestic ports, and there is probably one near you. They go out of LA, New York slash New Jersey. There's three different port cities in Florida. There's Galveston, there's Tampa Bay. You can see there are ports near you. Seattle, another one. So the cruising out of a domestic port is gonna help to bring down the cost of the airfare. I mean, it's just common sense. Domestic flights are gonna be less expensive than international flights. They're shorter, meaning the jet fuel is less expensive. Your food costs are included in a cruise, so you know you're all in. That also goes for a theme park if you buy the meal plan. So you know you're all in pricing before you even go, before you travel. On a cruise, cabin, meals, entertainment, the movement between different countries doesn't require internal flights. There's no additional hotel bookings in each country, and there's no currency roulette, which I also talk about in my Europe podcast across these borders. Then there is the pricing itself. So cruise demand for 2026 and into 2027 seasons, it is running hot. Cruising is like the new big thing. For me, it's always been the big thing, but more people are discovering that there is a cruise for them, which, if I don't change my mind like I have the past two weeks, will be next week's podcast. December bookings have surged 27%, and that's because the fares always go up in January, and then they have what we call wave season, which is like Black Friday for all cruising, they bring the pricing down to that December price. So I actually do recommend booking into the next year or even the year after that, since the itineraries are already open for most cruising 32028. Book in December or on Black Friday when during those flash sales before the pricing increases at the end of the year. Just to tell you how quote unquote hot cruising is, Carnival Corporation owns 11 cruise lines and they posted record revenue this year. Strong demand usually means the value disappears, but in this case, that is relative. Holiday sailing with a drive-to or short hop on an airplane port beats any European itinerary that it starts with a transatlantic fare that is up 25%. Cruising is also where I do my multi-generational work. An ocean ship is the one place that three generations can genuinely coexist. I have my own stories about that. My mom, my kids, and us. We cruised together. It was lovely. Nobody had to compromise. We all had our own cabins. Everybody got to do what they wanted during the day. And then we had dinner together and talked about our days. The ship did the diplomacy work for us. I talk about multi-generational cruising in depth in episode 124. Now I love a good land tour, do not get me wrong. But think about it. It's a big bus. It usually has 42 people, and you're together on the bus going from port to point. Everybody tours the sites together. Meals are usually together, and there's not a lot of free time booked into the daily schedule. So most of the people on the bus, 42 people, they're strangers when you're boarding the bus the first time. I recommend land tours for solo travelers who don't want to travel alone, like traveling with a group, like my tours, my group tours that are land tours, empty nesters also who want to travel as a group, but then they have one another for company. Now, the part people find the most surprising is that I love theme park travel in the season. It's more fun for me than European travel. And this year, because of the airfares, that gap widens. Now I know a theme park is not the most economical, but if you were saving for a trip to Europe, this can be a really good alternative. It can be a strictly adult vacation, or it can be a great place for that Thanksgiving or winter holiday meal with no cleanup. And I say that as someone who loves to book these trips for myself. The Thanksgiving holiday always overlaps with the Food and Wine Festival Epcot. If you can stretch your budget to book a club level lounge, your food costs go way down because they provide breakfast. They have a cocktail in the evening. And trust me, that evening cocktail hour, you can take snacks with you, and you can go to an after-hours event where you get so much bang for your buck in the parks. If you stay on site, you get some other parks like early invention, but you don't need a rental car because you can take that internal transportation. The flight is domestic. You can go either east or west, choosing what may have a nonstop flight for you, or definitely the one that's closest to you. And the same logic runs through cities that you might want to visit. Scottsdale, Napa, Sonoma, like I said, the Florida Keys, New York in December is beautiful, and you can see Hamilton still in person. Every one of these places I just mentioned, they're reachable on a domestic fair. And if you so choose a road trip, I talked about Route 66 in a previous episode, which will be in the show notes. After hours events that I always go to include Mickey's not so scary Halloween party. Halloween being my birthday, it is an annual tradition, excluding the one year that we did the Halloween Disney cruise instead. Another stop on my holiday calendar, again, Thanksgiving overlaps, is the Food and Wine Festival. And Thanksgiving happens to always fall near my wedding anniversary. So last year, Mr. Jet Setting and I we went for dinner at the Cake Bake. It's the newest restaurant. It's on the boardwalk. I love, love, love it. You can skip the holiday park traffic. And they have seasonal desserts that I swear live in my head rent-free. I've dreamed about this seasonal dessert that I had. One of the best desserts I've ever had. Last year for New Year's Eve, we traveled with family and friends to Orlando to watch my Longhorns team win their bowl game. And hopefully, a major bowl will become another tradition for my family and the Longhorns. We had one day in that trip to go to a theme park, and I chose Epcot. It was an all-adult group. The best ride at Walt Disney World theme park lives there, Guardians of the Galaxy, and it allowed us to book a great meal. Like I said, we all come to dinner together to close out the day. Or in the case of the elder teens, younger adults in the group, they had a good time to eat while everyone else in the crowds dispersed. So then they got a second chance to ride Guardians of the Galaxy. Now that was a very special trip because my cousin, who was with us, his father, my uncle, had passed away literally three weeks before our trip. In fact, I think we planned it at the house we were sitting Shiva in. But because I really wanted to make it special for them, for my cousin, his wife, and two kids, I booked a very special Magic Moments private photo session. We chose Italy, and we got to create some really special memories of the trip with that photo session. And of course, every group trip that I host includes a welcome gift. And this one, I included Longhorn Mouse ears that I got on Etsy. They were awesome for the photo shoot. I have great memories of that time together, all wearing our longhorn ears. Longhorns ears. I never know if it's longhorn or longhorns. If you know, if you're listening in Austin or you're a longhorns fan, and you know the answer to whether it's singular or plural, DM me in Instagram. That's in the show notes too. I really want to know. Now, aside from whether I really want to know whether it's longhorn or longhorns, and I really think it's plural longhorns, but I digress. Squirrel, here is another thought that keeps coming back to me. We sometimes think that luxury lies in the spontaneity, and trust me, I love a good spontaneous trip to our timeshare to get out of the heat or a last-minute cruise where the pricing is just right. But luxury that holds up over the winter holidays is when everyone who is going to be off the school or work has had opinions about the plan. It looks nothing like spontaneity. It actually is a decision that you made in the summertime. Booking early, it allows you to check on airline rewards tickets. Those are getting harder to come by. The cruise inventory works the same way. The cabin that you may desire most, like that midship's low cabin, so you're not attuned to CSIC, or I prefer forward instead of aft, those go first. And also our industry calendar, it typically runs on the school year. So after Labor Day, the supplier attention that we get with those specials, it fragments the group space that I might want to book for you for a multi-generational cruise or land destination that tightens in terms of room availability and cabin availability. And the easy conversation of what would have been held during the summer, it's harder to get everyone together just because our schedules become more fragmented in the fall. So decide now before your calendar hardens. And here is what we will do together. First of all, we'll decide who all is coming on the trip. So how many cabins or rooms do we need? What pace does everyone want? Do you want to go fast and furious one day at the theme parks? Or do you prefer a slower pace in Napa or Sonoma? That shape of the trip narrows down the map faster than a Google search or an AI search. We will price the flights that happen to go to that destination using nonstops as our first try. One flight beats three less expensive. In a year like this one, I really think Airfare can decide the trip. And we will run that number first. Here is the truth that pricing data keeps proving. Holiday season rewards the travelers you plan in advance and consider that right now your airfare is the largest portion of your vacation budget. December is closer than it feels. The window is open right now and it narrows each day of August. Next week, I kind of mentioned what I'm thinking of, but I'm not fully announcing it. It's a surprise because the last two weeks, maybe even three, I have changed my mind about the topic and pushed off my Japan trips until September. I want to make sure everybody's fully back in school, back commuting to work, so you have time to listen because there are three uh wonderful Japan episodes. So until next week, make every journey a memory worth savoring. And just like that, this episode is over. Thank you for joining me. If you've enjoyed today's episode, I would be thrilled if you would follow, like, and share this podcast with all of your like minded, wanderlusting friends, and leave a review on Apple iTunes or whichever podcast platform you listen to.