Last-Minute Trips Are Taking Off

Feb. 25 -- When Paula and John Conway know they have free time coming up, they surf travel Web sites to look for last-minute bargains on trips to anywhere from Dallas to Istanbul.

"Literally we'll get to Monday of a given week and we will just decide that we want to go away the coming weekend," says Paula Conway. "So I go online to the various search engines and look for deals."

The Westport, Conn., couple takes as many as a dozen trips a year — often with only a few days notice. In the process, they and others like them are changing a travel industry more accustomed to advance bookers than to last-minute ramblers.

Amid economic uncertainty and the threat of war with Iraq, last-minute travel has become an increasingly popular option for many consumers looking to save money and leery of booking their vacations too far ahead of time.

And a travel industry still suffering from the economic downturn has been only too happy to oblige. Many airlines and hotels are offering deep discounts to try to sell any available flights or rooms at the last minute.

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"It used to be that if you were traveling six from days from now you either paid through the nose or you didn't go," says Jared Blank, a senior analyst at New York-based business and technology research firm Jupiter Research. "Now there's a feeling from consumers [that] if I wait for a while, it's not the end of the world."

A Growing Trend

Around 64 percent of travelers in the year leading up to November booked at least one trip at the last minute, with about 34 percent booking within three to seven days of the trip and 41 percent planning within eight to 14 days before, according to a recent survey from the Washington, D.C.-based trade group Travel Industry Association of America.

The beneficiaries of this trend have been the many Internet travel Web sites that allow flexible travelers to book on short notice. A number of specialized sites — like Site59.com, LastMinuteTravel.com and 11thHourVacations.com, some of which allow travelers to book up to just hours ahead of time — have sprung up in recent years. Sites like Expedia.com, Orbitz.com and Travelocity.com also offer last-minute deals.