The only thing that's worse than traveling through congested airports and highways during the Thanksgiving season is the airfare that's associated with it. Taking advantage of the demand, airlines perennially jack up the prices on everyday airfare, making the simplest of tickets outrageously expensive.

Naturally, the easiest way around these fares is to fly on lower-demand days, or not Tuesday and Sunday. To illustrate this, our friends over at Travelocity put together the above dandy chart to show the differences in fares among travel days. It's pretty easy to see that the Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving are the most expensive days to fly. Conversely, departing on Thanksgiving Day and returning on Tuesday, the 30th is most often the cheapest.

Bear in mind that the data above only applies to domestic routes -- for travel to foreign countries (where there is no Thanksgiving), airfares can be drastically different and potentially even cheaper. More reason to spend the holidays abroad, we reckon.

Filed under: Business, Airlines, Airports, Budget Travel