The shoulder season is shrinking. Travel companies figured out people will pay full price in October.
This required sophisticated analytics. Someone at Marriott opened Excel. They noticed rooms were selling in March. They raised prices. The savings vanished. Turns out when you call something a "secret travel hack" in four hundred blog posts, it stops being secret.
Retail traders spent six months reading articles about shoulder season deals. They budgeted accordingly. They told their wives they were financial geniuses for booking Prague in November. Now Prague costs the same as July, except it's raining and everything closes at four.
The problem is algorithmic pricing. Hotels use software that adjusts rates based on demand. The software learned that cheapskates exist. It learned they book during specific windows. It raised prices during those windows. Congratulations to everyone who shared their "travel tips" on Reddit. You taught the algorithm where to find you.
Airlines joined in. September used to be cheap because nobody flew in September. Then everyone started flying in September because it was cheap. Now it's expensive and crowded. The shoulder season became a second peak season. The industry invented a new term for the actual cheap period: "the time when planes are empty because nobody wants to go there."
Some destinations still offer deals. They're in countries with active travel advisories. You can get a fantastic rate in January if you don't mind checkpoints.
The savings dwindled because the entire concept relied on information asymmetry. Travel companies didn't know when budget travelers would book. Now they know. They have your search history. They have your booking patterns. They have machine learning models trained on a decade of your cowardly attempts to save two hundred dollars.
Retail traders will adapt. They'll find new strategies. They'll start traveling during actual off-seasons when demand is genuinely low. We call those "Wednesday afternoons in February when you should be at work."
Photo by Frugal Flyer on Unsplash
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