The year's best time to travel: 'Dead Week'

By Ed Hewitt

updated 2:48 p.m. ET Nov. 22, 2006

While everyone from family to five o'clock news anchors frets the often-harrowing   Thanksgiving travel weekend, some travelers are looking right past turkey day to a bird of a different color: December's "Dead Week," the annual post-Thanksgiving lull in the travel habits of Americans (and Europeans, for that matter).

With very few people traveling in the run-up to the year-end holidays, Dead Week produces some of the best prices and opportunities of the year.

Early Thanksgiving = Opportunity
The so-called Dead Week is usually a bit longer than that, spanning the two weekends after the long Thanksgiving holiday. After that, you're headed into the holiday travel season proper, and all bets are off -- availability plunges, prices soar, airports swell with people, and tourist and holiday attractions are overrun with visitors, all well into the new year.

This year, the calendar should give travelers a full extra week (and then some) of seasonal and saving opportunities. Thanksgiving always falls on the fourth Thursday in November, which makes this year's 11/23 holiday only one day away from the earliest possible date. Additionally, Christmas falls on a Monday, so many folks won't really bail from their jobs and hit the road until Friday December 22 or Saturday December 23. As a result, we'll get close to three full weekends of lower volume, lower prices, and, in my experience, some of the best travel and tourism conditions of the year.

Why Pre-Holiday Travel Beats Holiday Travel
The first week of December is often a temperate one as far as weather goes -- this is the case throughout much of the northern hemisphere, and arguably almost worldwide, as spring is well-advanced in the southern hemisphere. Of course you won't be tanning in   Torino or swimming in   San Francisco at this time of year, but it is equally unlikely you will be stranded in by blizzards or ice storms -- it is only late fall after all -- and the cooler temps are more than balanced by outstanding ambience almost anywhere you care to travel.

Favorable weather, low volume and superb deals make these three weeks a favorite of many frequent and seasoned travelers. By traveling in early and mid-December, you can skip the tourist hordes and high prices and still enjoy all the trappings of holiday travel: lights, decorated trees, candles and menorahs, the most dramatic storefront and household displays of the year, extraordinary civic and commercial exhibits, and, not least, enough good cheer to last all year.

It is also a time of low expectations on the tourism front, which is the perfect cover for travelers who prefer to disappear into the local culture and live with the locals for a bit. Any "visitor fatigue" left over from the summer is almost completely dissipated, and most locals are too focused on the coming holidays to sweat a few travelers in their midst.

My most powerful experience was a combined business and leisure trip to   Paris in December a couple years back. While I had avoided Paris during the summer several times -- including driving within 10 miles of the city center twice in the past few years without even considering stopping -- my December 10 arrival found a city fully and almost casually going about its business of being one of the great centers of Western civilization. Bustle without bruising crowds, cultural attractions without crushing lines, and a room in the heart of town without ridiculous price markups made for one of the best "long weekend" trips I have ever made.

I had a mind-bending experience at a nearly empty Musee d'Orsay, which is packed with spectacular Impressionist paintings tailor-made for December viewing. The Louvre was similarly easy to roam, and as for the Eiffel Tower, we took a late morning run from one end of town to the Tower, stood in line for three minutes, rode to the top, peered around to our hearts' content, and were back on the pavement still loose enough to complete the run home. Try that in July.

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