Amazon Prime Big Deal Days could make you save more or spend more on holiday travel — here's how to snag the real deals on travel essentials

Round-trip domestic airfare for Thanksgiving is averaging $402, up 31% (or more than $95) from last year. Christmas airfare, meanwhile, is averaging $452, up 23% (or more than $85). Prices to international destinations have also climbed, with fares to Central America and Europe up 23% and 15% respectively.

But preparing for a trip can mean spending hundreds or thousands of dollars before you’ve even boarded the plane — on luggage, travel accessories, electronics, clothing and other gear.

According to PayPal’s 2026 Holiday Shopping Survey, nearly six in 10 Americans (58%) feel greater financial concern heading into the holidays. It’s no surprise sales sound so enticing.

But there’s an important distinction between buying at a discount and actually saving money.

So before you stock up for your holiday trip because something has a big red discount attached to it, here’s how to determine whether or not you’re actually getting a bargain.

Not all advertised sales reflect real savings

Travelers tend to spend about 25% of their total trip budget on non-travel items (or about $500 per trip) on things they don’t even need, Expedia research suggests — including clothing, shoes and accessories (70%), beauty and personal care products (63%), travel gear (53%) and electronics (39%).

And the research suggests that ads offer travelers useful ideas (60%), remind them of things they need (58%) and help them save money (57%) while they’re in trip-planning mode.

But the first thing to remember as ads for Prime Big Deal Days surface is that the size of the discount isn’t necessarily the same as the size of your savings. Amazon may show a current price alongside a higher reference price. But the more useful question is whether today’s tag is actually low compared to the product’s recent price points.

That’s especially important for travel purchases that you may feel you need to buy now before your upcoming trip — and before you miss out on the advertised deal.

Unfortunately, however, listed sales don’t always save you what they suggest.

A Washington Post analysis of nearly 50 products during last year’s October Prime event found that the average savings was just 0.6% when prices were compared with the previous six months — on top of the $139 annual fee to be a member of Amazon Prime. Some products were actually even more expensive during the sale.

“Next time Amazon hypes its Prime Days savings, remember this: The prices during the sale aren’t always better,” Geoffrey A. Fowler wrote for the Post. “I’ve got the receipts to prove it. I would have saved, on average, almost nothing … And, for some big-ticket purchases, I would have actually paid more.”

Not all ‘travel necessities’ are actually necessary

Even if an item advertised as 50% off really is 50% off, a 50% discount on something you don’t need isn’t really 50% savings.

If you spend $50 on a travel gadget because it’s marked down from $100, your bank account is still $50 lighter. And that’s particularly easy to overlook when shopping for “travel essentials” — especially if you’re traveling to an unfamiliar place, where you’re not sure about what to expect.

Before checking out, it’s important to ask yourself: “Would I buy this if it weren’t on sale?” If the answer is no, you may want to put it back in your cart — at least for now.

It’s also worth evaluating the essentiality of an item based on how often you believe you’ll actually use it. Something that costs $100 but will likely be used on various other trips, or even at home, has a very different value than something that costs $30 and is likely to sit in your closet after one vacation.

How to make sure a discount is actually a deal

Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days is designed to create urgency. Deals can be limited-time offers, and new promotions will appear throughout the event. But psychologists warn that those “buy now” buttons can trigger us to make “terrible buying choices.”

That’s why it can be helpful to make a travel-shopping list before browsing discounts during Prime Big Deal Days. This way, you can use the event to search for sales on items you’ve already planned to purchase — rather than scrolling through those sales, suddenly convincing yourself that you need stuff you don’t.

When you come across a discounted item that you might actually need (and use), instead of looking at how much an Amazon seller is offering off the product, the right question is: “What has this item actually cost over time?”