You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's Mariel.

We are coming up on the Super Bowl of travel in the U.S.

The moment when millions of people drag themselves to the airport

so they can eat soggy airport sandwiches and pack like sardines into metal tubes that shuttle them through the sky to their destination.

All in the name of seeing friends and family.

Scott Kies says he understands why people travel at Thanksgiving in the December holidays.

But from a travel perspective, it's one of the worst times to travel from disruptions to crowds to the price of the flights.

My secret best advice for travel over the holidays is if at all possible, just don't do it.

Scott, by the way, is the founder-in-chief flight expert at going.com, formerly known as Scott's cheap flights.

He says, if you can wait and travel in January, you will probably have a much better travel

experience.

My favorite date of the entire years, around January 8th, I circle that date on the calendar

because whereas flight prices really get inflated over the Christmas New Year period, around January 8th, they just fall off a cliff from the most expensive time of the entire year to the absolute cheapest.

But this episode of Life Kit is for the rest of you poor souls who will be traveling during the holidays.

Because lots of crowds plus winter weather can lead to delays and cancellations and just chaos.

So Scott is going to give us his very best tips on how you can try to avoid flight hiccups and what to do when they happen.

Music hiccups and what to do when they happen. Is there anything you can do when booking your flight to help prevent cancellations or make it less

likely that your flight will be canceled?

While there's always going to be a certain amount of randomness to flight disruptions,

when you dig into the data, you actually find that there are two types of flights that have

the highest odds of getting you to where you're going on time, or at least without a major delay.

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