A mix of thrill-seeking, thriftiness, and love of grab-bag surprises draws me to the off-season. Sure, I enjoy sunny skies and summer stages like anyone—but I’d rather not spend my vacation with everyone. Last-minute or oddly timed trips bring great memories and super value.

This year, my gig-based work life is close to 100-percent remote, making a surprise getaway truly possible. Maybe one would be for you, too! Going places when the breeze is unexpectedly cool, the waitpeople are chill and the bottom line is low can be an unbelievable rush, whether it’s a coordinated family effort or a solo escape. Here, learn all about reasons to love traveling off-season and how to do it right.

Off-Season Adventure: The Wind in Our Faces

An early-spring weekend trip to Austria’s Kitzbühler Alps was a grand adventure if not a cakewalk. I spot-translated the German overview for the little Rieplalmhütte hours before our departure from Munich, where we’d been encamped during my academic husband’s sabbatical. It mentioned barbecues and running water im Sommer—a red flag, but I was smitten. I web-booked beds (15 euros each per night!). It was a wintry March.

Our hearts raced when the car started to backslide down an icy mountain road, not to mention on the sparsely-signed, snowy trail we hiked for an hour and a half up to the house. A snowshoed group we met on the way smirked at my sneaker-boots and the brown bags of groceries we clutched in our arms. But the sun shone. We trekked on.

Scaling the picturesque peaks in March was as rewarding as it was butt-kicking.

Several wrong turns later, the view was next to heaven (1,370 meters’ elevation, baby!). The people we shared the barebones place with—a fun couple, crazy as us, whom we playfully promised to meet the next year—made it worth every tingling toe. Total amateurs, we’d picked a seriously off time of year to scale up these picturesque peaks. But it was as rewarding as it was butt-kicking. (Please do not attempt this, ever.)

Enjoy the Silence and the Emptiness

My friend Janet, perhaps more skilled than I at Googling weekend getaways, found a shockingly relaxed, mob-free Martha’s Vineyard when she and her husband visited the Massachusetts favorite in summer’s waning days one year. “It was a little wistful without the crowds and kids scooping at the ice cream shacks,” she concedes of the late September getaway.

All sad feelings dissipated, however, when they realized they could enjoy everything they’d come for without standing in lines or sidestepping nature-gawkers. “My husband and I seemed to be the only ones hiking in Waskosim’s Rock Reservation,” she says of the 185-acre haven, normally swarmed by birdwatchers, walkers, and mountain bikers.

Usually, crowded hiking trails are delightfully empty; window seats at popular restaurants can go begging off-season.

The couple found luck at mealtime, too. “We were able to get a table at the Homeport Restaurant & Oyster Bar in Chilmark as the sun set,” Janet remembers, astounded by such fortune without forethought.

The Beach-Town Exodus: Another Off-Season Allure

Her story reveals that vacationing oceanside isn’t something many folks consider in the off months. Too bad (for them), because beach towns with chilly nights and still-warm waters, at least in early autumn, are awesome places to camp, convalesce, and get serious work done, like on your new e-commerce concept or novel you started years ago.

“The crowds just go away,” agrees Patty Willett, an independent TV and film producer and production manager who spends downtime in Point Pleasant Beach on the Jersey Shore. The overnight transformation post-Labor Day never fails to stun her, she says. Tourists hit the road. A community of locals reunites.

Sometimes, there’s not one other person on the beach off-season. You bundle up and hunt for sea glass.

“Sometimes when I go out, there’s not one other person on the beach,” Willett shares. Lifeguards are off, the water can be rough, so it’s not swim time, and the air currents whip up, too. “It gets windy, but you bundle up,” she says. When daily beach maintenance ends, Willett divulges, “the sea glass comes out.” She finds headspace hunting for blue and green slivers in the sand. Lower rents for shore shacks can also emerge.

Off-Season Travel’s Great Rates

Which brings us to another reason to love off-season travel: the wallet-friendliness. “I booked my roundtrip ticket to Paris on American Airlines, relatively last-minute, for 52,500 miles, reveals Carrie Kirby, who shares travel-deal tips on her Miles Mom blog. Hotel and airfare prices tend to be way cheaper, too, if you’re not going the points or miles route. “I once booked a hotel room in Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains for $99 a night in late fall versus the $300+ price tag in summer, the high season,” says Janet.

Whether you’re paying with cash, miles, or points, off-season travel can offer steep discounts vs. high season.

Kirby and her college-age daughter went last year, long before Olympic fever hit, during the off-season mecca: March. “We enjoyed the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, and strolling along the Seine,” she says, without any of the summertime tourist-phobia.

As a part-time Münchner, I recommend coming to Germany’s Oktoberfest and Christmas Market city when the mad-rush events aren’t happening or even the week before. Enjoy the anticipation and the history-rich city and perhaps attend the first day, then make a quick exit, flying out just as everyone else is filling out their lost luggage form.

The Sweet Spot: Traveling Off-Season Opens Up New Vistas

Going to any place in the off-season, you may miss out on the thing that everyone goes there to see or do—because it’s closed, inaccessible, or just not quite as much fun when you have to wear a double-thermal wetsuit. Then again, the guidebooks don’t know all.

The travel guidebooks don’t know all. Sometimes, off-season yields experiences more memorable than the usual “best time to travel.”

“I’ve found, more often, there’s plenty to gain,” says New York City-based freelance photographer and travel writer Susan Portnoy. On a trip to Northwestern Norway in April, when temps rise but consistently balmy weather hasn’t arrived in this high-elevation land, Portnoy found a sort of split climate she hadn’t imagined was waiting for her. “For a few weeks,” Portnoy says. “I could throw snowballs and pick wildflowers the same morning. Another day, I snowshoed in three feet of powder and later hiked up Nesaksla Mountain, in Ådalsnes, in a t-shirt.”

Traveling Off-Season: Smart Strategies

How to plan a stealth escape? Here’s some advice:

• Start by mapping, as much as a year into the future, weeks or weekends when you and your travel companions can get away. The more counter-intuitive, the better—like, how about the stretch between Black Friday and Hannukah and/or Christmas (which, if you haven’t yet checked, overlap on the calendar this year).
• Consider when your airline miles or hotel points go further. If you can get two round-trip tickets, say, to Rio at no cost during an airline’s frequent flyer “low-season” period, zero in on traveling then.
• Follow social media accounts for travel companies in your bucket list places, or send emails inquiring about off-season availability. Set flight and room-rate alerts on search sites.
• Another tip: Research local school schedules, which often coincide with high seasons, and avoid them.
• Research, then cross off places with absolute dealbreakers, such as hurricane and wildfire seasons, times of extreme heat or cold, and giant jellyfish migrations (fascinating for some, terror-triggering for others, like me).
• Put out word to your personal network that you’re looking for off-season travel ideas. You’d be surprised how often someone’s friend’s cousin has a ski chalet they are looking to rent in the summer or an apartment in Miami that’s sitting empty much of the year.

Soon enough, you’ll be ready to go—just as everyone else is packing up to head home.