Last November I stood at the gate end of Concourse A at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport with a boarding pass for a 7:05 a.m. departure, a backpack that had already been weighed twice, and the specific regret of someone who had paid $180 for a return trip he could have had for $95 three weeks earlier. My term dates were locked by mid-October: seminars until the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, one resit scheduled for the Monday after, no room to move either end. That is the whole problem in miniature. A student who flies home two or three times a year knows the dates months ahead, which sounds like an advantage until you realise the airlines know them too.
Booking early, and what it actually buys you
Here is what fixed dates get you: certainty, and nothing else guaranteed. I watched fares from the first week of September, and the pattern was boring and consistent. Short-haul leisure routes like this one tend to bottom out three to five weeks ahead, so a late-October purchase sat right at the edge of the cheap window, while the Tuesday and Wednesday departures immediately before the holiday were already climbing. Midweek flying is genuinely cheaper, because business demand has gone home and leisure travellers are stuck in the same pre-holiday crush as everyone else, but the day you buy on does not set anything. I tested that once, out of pure superstition, searching at midnight and again at lunchtime from a library terminal, and the fare moved by four dollars in the wrong direction.
The parade is free to watch, which matters more than the flight. You stand on Woodward Avenue, you arrive before eight because the crowds thicken fast near the corner of Michigan, and the coffee from a coney place on the way costs a couple of dollars rather than the near-$6 an airport kiosk wanted from me on the return leg. Where the money actually goes, roughly:
- Return flight, booked three weeks out: $180 with one carry-on
- Airport parking, split four ways: $12 each for three nights
- Parade morning: free, plus $3 for coffee and a coney
- Hockey or the football game, if I bother: $35 upper bowl
- The thing I always forget: $15 for food at DTW, because the security line ate my margin
Carrying one bag is not a philosophy for me, it is arithmetic. A checked case would have added $60 return on the fare I bought, which is nearly a third of the ticket, and the connection through a hub makes a lost bag a real possibility on a holiday weekend. So I wear the coat onto the plane, and everything else fits. If your dates are firm and your budget is not, cheap flights detroit is where I start before I compare anything else, mostly because seeing the whole month at once stops me panicking into a bad fare.
Staying flexible, and who that suits
The opposite approach works, and I will not pretend otherwise. If you have no resit, no seminar attendance rule and no family timetable pinned to a specific Thursday, then flying out on the Tuesday and back on the following Monday puts you on the cheap days at both ends, which can knock $70 to $90 off a return like mine. The cost is that you book late, so you gamble on inventory, and holiday inventory is thin. I have a friend who did exactly this and paid $240 for the privilege of a lie-in. The trade is real in both directions.
Which is why the honest answer depends on one thing, and it is not the money. It is whether your term dates are genuinely immovable. Mine were, so I bought early, paid the premium, and spent the parade morning warm enough and on time. If yours are not, wait, and take the risk.
What I would skip
The drive, for one. Detroit is a car city and the temptation to borrow something and go is strong, but from Ann Arbor or East Lansing the fuel and the parking downtown on parade morning cancel most of the saving, and you arrive having already spent your patience on the Lodge. The train down from Pontiac or the bus from Chicago is the better comparison if you live on those lines, and for once it genuinely wins on a short hop where the airport shuffle adds an hour either end. Otherwise the forty-minute flight beats a four-hour drive, and I say that as someone who hates paying for it.
The variable that decides everything is not the fare, and not the day you buy. It is whether your semester lets you leave on a Tuesday.