Every year, certain cities see more demand from travelers. With numerous social media influencers promoting "quiet life travel," destinations away from the buzz of big cities have become especially popular for a certain time this year.
A recent Pinterest (PINS) report showed a spike in searches for Peru's Machu Picchu, Scotland's Edinburgh and Canada's Jasper alongside terms such as "solo travel" and "cabin in the mountains."
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The latest flight aggregation tool to release statistics is Google Flights (GOOGL) — for travelers on the lookout for Thanksgiving getaways, Orlando, Cancun, New York, Tokyo and London were the most popular cities.
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When it comes to Christmas and New Year's Eve, the top cities are Tokyo, Orlando, Cancun, Miami and New York. The data looks at flights between Dec. 22 and Jan. 5 departing from U.S. airports.
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"If you're traveling within the U.S. for Thanksgiving, our aggregate data shows that the cheapest fares are usually available in early October," Google's Group Product Manager James Byers said in a statement to Fox News.
Appearing both on the Thanksgiving and Christmas lists, Orlando is understandably a popular destination due to the number of families planning trips to Disney (DIS) and Universal for the holidays while Tokyo's presence reflects a growing interest in Asia travel from Americans over the last year.
Australia's Sydney appeared in the Christmas and New Year's top searches but not the Thanksgiving ones while Chicago, Dallas and Phoenix all appeared only in the Thanksgiving top list. In general, the December searches had more exotic destinations given the high numbers of people traveling domestically for Thanksgiving.
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Airlines are responding to trending travel destinations (here is how)
Airlines, in turn, have also been responding to changing travel trends with new routes to particular destinations. For the upcoming sun-seeking season, American Airlines (AAL) added new flights to places like St. Lucia, St. Maarten, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines while competitors such as JetBlue (JBLU) and Southwest (LUV) are focusing on the Bahamas and Puerto Rico.
On the U.S.-Asia side, United Airlines (UAL) launched new routes to destinations such as Hong Kong, Seoul and Cebu in the Philippines earlier this year.
The latter is known as a "fifth freedom" flight in which the flight stops at and drops a certain number of travelers off in Tokyo before going on to the second destination (Cebu has been becoming increasingly popular among tourists on the way to islands on the country's coast).
Delta Air Lines (DAL) and American have also been trying to hone in on the Asia demand with new flights to Tokyo and Hong Kong that started out as seasonal routes but now continue to run into the fall and winter seasons.
"American looks forward to launching flights between JFK and Tokyo Haneda Airport this summer," American SVP of Network and Schedule Planning Brian Znotins said earlier this year about a new 14-hour flight to Tokyo from New York. "This new service will complement flights offered by our joint business partner, Japan Airlines, giving more ways for our customers to travel between the U.S. and Japan."
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