If your instinct is to pounce the second Black Friday travel deals go live, new data suggests you might be better off waiting a couple of days. Skyscanner's analysis of its 2025 flight pricing found Cyber Monday delivered the lowest average seat price across the entire late-November sales run — Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Travel Tuesday included.

The destination numbers are just as interesting. Over the full five-day sales window, Calgary in Canada recorded the biggest fare cuts, down 35 per cent against the previous year's average. Buenos Aires followed at 29 per cent, Barcelona at 27 per cent, then Milan and Honolulu filling out the top five.

Travel Tuesday — the closing act of the sale week, now a dedicated travel shopping day in its own right — told a different story. Honolulu led the drops at 27 per cent, with Buenos Aires at 21 per cent and Los Angeles at 16 per cent, while Taipei and Vietnam's Da Nang both fell 14 per cent. For Australian travellers, that's a familiar list: the US remains a top-ten outbound pick and Honolulu is a long-running favourite, even as US-bound demand softens into 2026.

Where people were searching is arguably the quirkiest part. Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan saw search interest jump 175 per cent during the sales period, with Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland up 85 per cent and Hamilton in New Zealand up 66 per cent. On Travel Tuesday alone, Lima in Peru drew the largest spike, up 88 per cent.

So does Travel Tuesday still matter? Skyscanner travel expert Jarrod Kris thinks so. By the time it rolls around, he notes, most people have finished their planning — which is precisely when airlines and hotels push out attention-grabbing offers to spark next year's bookings. In other words, the last day of the sale week can still hide genuine bargains for anyone willing to look.

His broader advice is a useful antidote to the late-November frenzy: don't rush, and don't grab the first deal you see. Stay flexible on dates, set up fare tracking, and keep an open mind on destination. The best booking is the one that fits your budget and timing, not the one with the loudest countdown timer.

The practical takeaway is simple: treat the whole Black Friday-to-Travel Tuesday stretch as one long sales period, do your homework early, and be ready to book when the fare actually dips — which, on average, is more likely to be Cyber Monday than Black Friday itself.