It helps travelers get more mileage out of their money.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday aren’t the only autumn days where one can snag the deal of a lifetime. Cash-strapped globetrotters are salivating over “Travel Tuesday,” an increasingly popular holiday that targets those who want discounts on traversing the world.
“It generated good sales for us,” Kristen Jennings Graff, director of sales and marketing at the Bawah Reserve, an eco-resort in Indonesia’s Riau Islands, said while outlining a “Travel Tuesday” promotion in 2023, CNBC reported.
The burgeoning phenomenon, which falls on Tuesday, Dec. 3, this year, is a lot like Black Friday, the post-Thankgsiving bonanza that sees retailers offer special one-day deals and discounts. However, instead of flat-screen TVs and other electronics, this bargain binge concerns airline flights, cruises and hotels, often offering between 20% and 30% off of the best available rates.
First popularized in 2018 by online booking platform Hopper, Travel Tuesday has soared in popularity recently with Google search interest skyrocketing by 500% from 2021 to 2023, per a Thursday report by strategy and management firm McKinsey & Company.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the holiday’s boom comes right as people are yearning to globetrot more than ever but are hamstrung by stratospheric airfare and hotel costs amid inflation.
According to McKinsey, Travel Tuesday searches are highest among Americans and Canadians, but “elevated volume is also observable” throughout Australia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Spain.
This phenomenon was supported by Google Trends, which showed that searches for the wanderlust holiday began in November 2017, declined over the COVID-19 pandemic, and then spiked again in 2022 and 2023, mainly in the aforementioned regions.
While Travel Tuesday mania has yet to capture Asia, Eastern companies also are taking advantage of the trend.
Last year, Indonesian ecolodge Bawah Reserve offered customers a choice of an upgrade, discount or one free flight — a promotion that proved quite fruitful, said Graff.
U.S. travelers have put their money where their mouths are on Travel Tuesday, which occurred on Nov. 28 last year.
That day, airline bookings among American vacationers soared by more than 60% and cruises by more than 50% compared with the two-week periods before and after the holiday, per the report.
Search data suggested that bookings were centered around resort destinations such as Nassau, Bahamas and Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic, presumably because the hotels tend to offer package deals.
However, McKinsey theorized that travelers whose motherlands have gloomy weather are more likely to book sunny, gorgeous destinations.
Travel Tuesday is even threatening to eclipse traditional fall free-for-alls.
While searches for “Cyber Monday” — another Thanksgiving-adjacent discount holiday that concerns e-commerce transactions — still far exceed those for “Travel Tuesday,” interest in the former is waning.
“Travel bookings made on Travel Tuesday have surpassed those made on Cyber Monday,” according to Ryan Mann, one of the report authors.
The holiday’s popularity will likely continue to boom as wanderlust enraptures the U.S.
A recent WalletHub travel survey found that 58% of Americans would rather spend money on travel rather than retail.
