Carmen
Travel editor at Reisedrop · 2026-09-01
Know the feeling? Half of Instagram is already posting palm trees for the holidays, your colleague ‘obviously booked back in May’ — and there you are in early December with exactly zero plans. Breathe. We’ve done this ourselves, more than once. Organising Christmas holidays last minute is pricier than booking ahead, sure. But all is far from lost. You just have to look where there’s actually still availability — not where everyone else is stampeding.
Be flexible — on destination, dates and departure airport
The biggest mistake is getting hung up on one dream destination. Don’t search ‘Maldives’, search ‘sun within six flight hours’ — and suddenly Hurghada, Agadir and the Cape Verde islands pop up, where large charter flights almost always have a few seats left. Second lever, and this one is gold: fly on 24, 25 or 31 December. Those are the cheapest flight days of the whole winter, because nobody wants to be on a plane on Christmas Eve. We do: take off at 3 pm, raise a toast with your feet in the sand by 9 pm — honestly, there are worse Christmases. And the third lever: check Basel and Milan too. Different airports, different operators, different allotments.
Big beats beautiful — at least right now
For boutique hotels with twelve rooms, you’re simply too late in December — those were gone in September. That 400-room resort on Fuerteventura, though? On 20 December, it will almost certainly still have something free — and may even drop prices if blocks stay empty. The second underrated trick: cities instead of beaches. Over the holidays, business cities empty out completely. Lisbon, Seville, Athens — mild, atmospheric, surprisingly affordable. New Year’s Eve on Praça do Comércio, fireworks over the Tagus, admission: zero Franken. It was one of our best New Year’s Eves ever.
Let technology do the night shift
Even in December, prices still drop — whenever tour operators write off their remaining allotments, which from experience often happens on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. But who wants to click through ten searches every morning? Instead, set price alerts for three or four destinations at once and let your inbox wake you up when one goes off. Costs nothing. And combine it with the «±3 days» search: around the holidays in particular, there are regularly several hundred Franken between two neighbouring departure dates. If you travel from 26.12 to 4.1 instead of 23.12 to 2.1, you neatly avoid both price peaks — and miss absolutely nothing at home.
Plan B is still a plan
And if nothing sensible is left at all? Turn it around. Book the February sports holidays or Easter now at an early-booking price and put the destination in an envelope under the tree at Christmas. Sounds like a consolation prize, but it isn’t one: anticipation of a trip has been shown to make people happier than the trip itself — that’s actually been studied. Your bank account tends to agree, by the way.