Busy time at the border

With gas prices continuing to fall, taking a road trip this Christmas is looking more enticing. Gas is nearly 30 cents a litre cheaper than it was during Christmas week last year. And the price is even better a little further south.

The Elliott’s have done some comparison pricing and with the low price of gas decided driving to Florida was deal this year: “You could drive down there and back with gas, hotel one night. And it’s like $300, and you could never get a flight to Florida for that.”

There were a number of travellers at the Peace Bridge duty free today.

“Avoiding airports is what we’re doing.”

If you’re driving south, you won’t really see a deep drop in gas prices until you hit the Pennsylvania line. The only states with prices higher than New York are Alaska and Hawaii.

But take a look at the prices at the pump as you drive south through Kentucky and Tennessee. They’re about 2.30 U.S. a gallon, a little higher in Georgia and Florida.

Travellers are calling it a nice bonus: “I’ve look online at prices in Sarasota where we’re going and when you convert to litres and to the Canadian dollar, it’s selling at 70 cents a litre, so that’s pretty competitive.”

Even if you’re only driving a few hours to Cleveland, you’re still saving money.

“It’s much less so I usually end up filling up when I’m there. And I usually end up filling up in New York right before I come back.”

But prices at the pump in Ontario look good too.

Last year at this time gasoline was $1.25 a litre. Today it’s averaging 97 cents.

Driving to last week’s Bills game in a gas guzzler, this fan still had a lot of cash in his pocket: “Took my buddy’s F150 down from Ottawa and that’s quite a lot of fuel. We saved about $50 on the trip.”

Because of savings like that, more vehicles may be on the road this Christmas season.

This month, CAA Niagara is seeing more people asking for their travel planners. In fact their TripTik requests are up 10% over this same period last year.