Thursday, Twin Cities.
Tuesday's issue was the big trips. This one's the short hops — three nonstops out of MSP that are all sitting at or below where these routes normally bottom out. Two of them are on Sun Country, which is becoming a theme.
🌴 MSP → Charleston (CHS) — $314 round-trip
Sat Nov 14 – Fri Nov 20 · Delta, nonstop · 3 hrs
Google's own data puts the usual range on this route at $285–530. A nonstop at $314 sits at the bottom of that band, and mid-November is the quiet sweet spot in Charleston: the summer humidity is long gone, hurricane season is over, and the rates drop before the holiday crowds show up in December.
There's also a $242 fare on Southwest for Nov 7–14. It's a one-stop that turns a 3-hour flight into 6. More on that below.
Book by: Two weeks. Southeast nonstops in the off-season don't move fast, but they don't come back either.
🌇 MSP → Los Angeles (LAX) — $222 round-trip
Thu Dec 10 – Wed Dec 16 · Sun Country, nonstop · 4 hrs
This is the clearest example yet of the Sun Country gap. Same route, same dates, same nonstop: Sun Country $222, Delta $378. $156 apart for the identical flight profile.
Mid-December in LA is 68°F and dry. If you've been thinking about escaping the first real cold snap, this is the cheap week to do it — fares climb hard after the 18th when holiday travel kicks in.
The honest caveat: Sun Country charges for bags and seat selection. A checked bag closes about $60 of that $156. If you're travelling with a carry-on or less, it's not close.
Book by: Within a week. December fares firm up fast once we're inside 90 days.
🎸 MSP → Nashville (BNA) — $208 round-trip
Late Oct – early Nov · Southwest, nonstop · 2 hrs
Two hours door to door, $208 round-trip, nonstop. This is the lowest-friction weekend trip available from MSP right now, and Google's price model is flagging that we're inside the cheapest booking window for the route.
Worth knowing: Southwest still includes two checked bags in that fare, which makes $208 an all-in number rather than a starting point. That's rare enough now to be worth saying out loud.
Book by: Mid-October, per Google's own window.
What $72 buys you
Back to Charleston. You can fly it nonstop on Delta for $314 in 3 hours, or one-stop on Southwest for $242 in 6.
That's $72 for three hours of your Saturday, each way. Six hours of your weekend, total, for the price of a decent dinner.
We're not going to tell you which side of that to land on — it depends on whether you're going for four days or ten, and whether you'd rather arrive at noon or at dinner. But we will always show you both numbers and the time difference, because "cheapest" and "best" are different columns, and most flight-deal emails only print the first one.
That's Thursday. Tuesday we'll be back with bigger trips — Europe is still unusually soft for late fall and we're watching a few routes closely.
If you booked something from Tuesday's issue, reply and tell us. We're curious whether the Rome fare got anyone moving.
— MSP Departure
P.S. Forward this to someone in the Twin Cities who'd use it. Three referrals gets you the MSP Travel Cheat Sheet — booking windows by route, when each region's fares drop, and the routes out of here nobody talks about.