Off Season Travel - 5 Reasons to Do it Now

When one thinks of a vacation, usually it’s very much associated with the summertime, when good weather is almost assured and families with children are able to take time off to jaunt to exotic locations around the country and the world. This said, of the three big trips we’ve taken over the past year, two have been in the off season, and one in the almost off season.

And we certainly wouldn’t have it any other way. Traveling in the off season is, for us, a much better alternative than traveling in peak season. Here are the reasons why:

There are fewer people. We’re completely open about being travel misanthropes. While it’s great to share a conversation with other travelers on a long haul bus ride, or even in a communal hostel kitchen, travel for us is a very personal venture where we try to be as connected with each other as possible. This connection is aided by fewer crowds, for sure. It also maybe says something about us that the places we travel don’t seem to attract the same kinds of hordes as do more mainstream travel destinations, but maybe I should save that conversation for my fictional therapist.
Fewer people means empty accommodations. While we try to stay in apartments and airbnb as much as we can, the further off the beaten path you get, the less available are such options. For example, when traipsing through less frequented parts of the South Balkans, the only place we were able to secure an airbnb to our liking was in Skopje, Macedonia. The rest of the time we stayed in hostels and hotels. And of all of the cities we stayed in, we only had cohabitants in Sofia, Bulgaria. In Prishtinë and Prizren in Kosovo, Ohrid in Macedonia, and in Kalofer and Veliko Tarnovo in Bulgaria we had shared bathrooms and kitchens to ourselves in every place we stayed. And, on top of this, the owners of each of these accommodations was happy to have business during the typical slow time of year. In Kalofer, Bulgaria, this also meant the best meal of our entire trip. Many places with more pronounced peaks and valleys in tourist volume will also have cheaper prices for accommodation in the off season.
Fewer people also means empty planes. For economy fliers (do I know anyone that flies business or first class ANYWAY?) this one is big. If you are flying a mainline tourist route (for us, this includes pretty much any direct flight to Europe), you are much more likely to fly on an underbooked flight if it falls into one of these two categories: during midweek (or basically NOT Friday or Saturday) or during the off season. Double likely if both of those conditions are met. Our flights to and from Seattle to Frankfurt were so underbooked that David and I were able to share a row on the way, and each have our entire own row on the way back. In this era of overbooking (don’t get me started on the debacle on our way back from Malta this year), flying on an underbooked flight is like winning the lottery, and no Lufthansa, I will not be paying an additional 350 Euro to upgrade to your crappy Economy Plus. Additionally, like with accommodation, less demand means lower prices quite often – it pays to research if your fares could be cheaper in specific times of year, and when they’ll be at their lowest. David and I were able to get tickets to and from the Balkans for $200 less than normal each by booking a week before departure and traveling in the off season.
Traveling in the off season gives you the opportunity to see a place through an uncommon lens. Scanning through travel photos usually lets us only see the “best” face of a place. And while that’s all well and good, traveling in the fall, winter, or spring can show us a different side of a place than we’ve already explored. For example, being in Tbilisi, Georgia over New Years gave us a glimpse into how that culture celebrated those holidays (spoiler alert: pretty drunk and noisy) and the traditions that went along with them.
Traveling in the off season can be, dare I say, more authentic. Fewer tourists arounds can mean that people that actually live in a place aren’t jumping through hoops to present a manufactured, Disneyland-like version of their home country/city/etc. to the tourists visiting. We’ve found that, when that facade is dropped, we’ve been able to have more real interactions with people in a place, rather than the typical exchanges that might happen between guide and tourist. Nowhere was this more true for me than in Mongolia, and I count the people I met there among the closest friends I’ve ever made while traveling.