Photo via Colin Brown Photography (Shared under Creative Commons)

It’s about to get very cold, or at least cold by recent standards. Sometime this month many of us will ask ourselves why we live here in January. Which got us wondering, do cold winters drive more Minnesotans to travel? We decided to take the question to Sun Country Airlines, which exclusively caters to locally based leisure travelers. Winter demand is basically inexhaustible for the airline.

Surprisingly, the answer to our question was … “no!” It’s one thing to live in Philly or Portland, where some winters are cold, but others are mild and there’s little need to get away from 50 and cloudy. But here, “the expectation is it’s going to be cold and tough, and those trips are ingrained in the culture,” explains the airline’s chief revenue offer, Grant Whitney.

“You might see a bit of change on the margins [in a cold winter],” he adds, “but not much.” Similarly, 2024’s unseasonably warm and rainy El Niño winter only “narrowly” didn’t meet expectations for the airline, and that may have been due to a glut of capacity from other budget carriers.

Sun Country has added dozens of destinations in recent years, but the bulk of them are served in summer. And though the odd Minnesotan has come around on the glories of Roatan, Honduras, Sun Country is still primarily running an air bridge to Orlando, Ft. Myers, Phoenix, Cancun, and Cozumel in winter.

Whitney says, “winter demand patterns are very concentrated,” to a few places over a few weeks.

So even though it’s about to get nasty cold, most of you will wait until March to escape. Whitney expects to see a little blip next Tuesday after the cold snap—the day of the week Sun Country’s bookings are highest—but they won’t be to escape the current cold snap. And running a sale doesn’t make much of a difference either, he says.

“It’s hard to stimulate winter travel demand here. So, we’re built to fly when people want to fly.”