Día de las Velitas falls on the night of December 7, and if you want to be standing on a Colombian street when the candles go down, you are buying tickets during the most expensive fortnight of the Andean year. I learned this the way I learn most things, by paying too much for four seats in 2023 because I thought October was early enough. It was not.
The case for booking the date in stone
The math is boring but it is the whole argument. A Bogota to Medellin round trip for four people, booked in early September for December 5 out and December 9 back on Avianca, ran me 412,000 pesos per person with luggage added. Two weeks later, the same seats were 690,000. By November, only middle seats in separate rows remained, and my six-year-old would have been sitting alone, which is not a thing I am willing to do to a flight attendant.
December 7 is a fixed date. It does not move for your schedule, it does not move for a sale, and every Colombian family with relatives in another city is competing for the same narrow band of departures. If your trip exists to see the candles, you are not flexible, you just have not admitted it yet. Fixed dates are exactly where the price grid punishes you, and exactly where booking first wins.
What you should lock in early:
- The flight, because December 5 to 9 is the peak of peaks
- Seat assignments together, even if it costs extra
- A hotel near the candle route, not the one you liked in July
- Ground transport to the neighborhood, since taxis surge after dark
The case for waiting, which is real
Here is where I annoy people who want one answer. If your reason for going is family rather than the specific night, January is cheaper by a lot, the candles are gone but the food is the same, and Cartagena in January is Cartagena. Villa de Leyva and Quibdo both run their own versions of the tradition on the same date, which means demand splits across three towns instead of concentrating, and I have seen fares to Quibdo drop by a third for a departure on December 8 itself, once the seventh has passed.
Flexible travelers also get to use the month view on the price grid rather than guessing. I check where to fly from Bogota with the whole calendar open, and the difference between December 7 and December 10 is usually visible in one screen. The trap is that the flexible version of this trip is not really the same trip. You are trading the candles for a cheaper week, and pretending otherwise is how you end up disappointed at a quiet plaza.
Where the plane loses
For Medellin or Cartagena from Bogota, flying is not the obvious answer. The bus to Medellin is around 90,000 pesos per person overnight, four seats for less than one airline ticket, and you sleep through it. With two kids that trade is worse than it sounds, because nobody sleeps, but for adults it wins outright. Flying only wins here because the bus eats a day each way and December is short.
What actually decides it is not price, it is whether December 7 is the point of the trip or just the excuse for it.
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