The Sale That Comes Too Late for Winter Sun
On 28 January this year, in the middle of the season the industry calls the January sales, the Advertising Standards Authority ruled against a TUI advert that promised a couple an "Inc £187.74 Total Discount" on a Las Vegas holiday. By checkout, the total price had climbed by £722.62. The saving you were shown had not survived as far as the payment page.
It's a question we hear most years, around now: is it worth holding off on winter sun until the January sales, rather than booking in August? We've spent this month building toward an honest answer, piece by piece. This is where those threads meet. The January sales are a real date in the calendar. Whether the saving inside them is real, and whether it even arrives in time to help you, are two separate questions, and neither is a simple yes.
What the January Sales Are
The industry has a name for its own busiest booking day: Sunshine Saturday, the first Saturday after the New Year return to work. This January, the Civil Aviation Authority forecast a five per cent rise in package holiday bookings and more than 200,000 additional holidaymakers booking that weekend, building on the 4.3 million ATOL-protected bookings made the January before. Selina Chadha, the CAA's Group Director for Consumers and Markets, called it one of the busiest days of the year for the trade. That volume is real and well documented. It tells you when people decide. It does not tell you whether what they buy that weekend costs less than it would in August.
Whether the Discount Is Real
The regulator's rule here is specific: a "was" price or a percentage saving can only be advertised if the trader can show that figure is genuinely what customers would otherwise have paid. The Las Vegas ruling above isn't isolated. In the past eighteen months the ASA has also upheld a complaint against Secret Escapes, over a Bournemouth hotel offer advertised "up to -46% today" that added the value of extras like a late check-out to the reference price before calculating the discount, and banned "from" price adverts from Hilton, Travelodge, Booking.com and Accor, after finding only a handful of rooms were ever available at the price shown. Since April last year, the Competition and Markets Authority has required every UK travel price to be the true total, no additions at checkout, and is reviewing hundreds of businesses across nineteen sectors, travel among them, for this exact gap. None of this means every January sale is invented. The discount is the part of the claim that needs checking, not the part you take on trust.
'The discount is the part of the claim that needs checking, not the part you take on trust.'
The Timing Problem Nobody Mentions
A second problem sits underneath waiting for the January sales, and it's simpler: timing. Winter sun mostly departs between November and the first days of January, and the programme goes on sale the previous summer: TUI opened its winter 2026/27 season on 7 July 2025, more than a year before the last of those flights leave. Sunshine Saturday itself falls in the first days of January, which means by the time the sale everyone's waiting for begins, most of a winter's departures have already happened, or are about to.
'By the time the sale everyone's waiting for begins, most of a winter's departures have already happened, or are about to.'
What's still genuinely ahead of you that week is the back half of the season: February half-term, the Easter fortnight, the quieter weeks between. English schools break up for February half-term the week of Monday 15 February 2027, as several councils have already published, though some break a week earlier. If a January sale is going to help you at all, that's more likely where, not the trip most people picture when they say winter sun.
The Honest Complication
None of this means waiting never pays. Kayak's own UK data, cited earlier this month, names January as the cheapest month to book a hotel, and says the cheapest time to book generally is the week of the stay itself. Travel agents report the same pattern from the ground: Amanda Matthews of Designer Travel told Travel Weekly this year that during a recent late-booking surge, "holidays are cheaper, so we were slightly down on revenue," even as bookings rose, and Advantage Travel Partnership's David Moon named the same pattern: demand for "late, value-led bookings." That evidence is from the early-summer window rather than winter sun specifically, so we're stating it as a general pattern, not a promise for January. What it tells you is real: a genuinely empty room close to departure often gets discounted rather than lost. That isn't the same as a sale with a start date printed on the calendar. One is spare capacity. The other is marketing.
What We'd Do
Here is the distinction we'd draw, sitting down with you at No.82. If there's a specific hotel, room or fortnight you've already pictured, don't wait for a sale to move on it. No discount recreates a room that's already gone, and the choice, not the price, is what a long booking window costs you. If your dates are genuinely open and you're chasing sunshine rather than one particular door, a late booking on a genuinely discounted room can work in your favour, the same way it does for a hotel with an empty room the week before. We watch the regulator's rulings and the booking data every month, not because either is glamorous, but because knowing the difference is most of what a boutique advisor is for. Come in and show us what you're weighing up, and we'll tell you plainly which kind of decision you're making.
Come find us at No.82.
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