As the first long weekend of the warm weather days is fast approaching, we thought we would take the time to comment on the regularly occurring question that we receive: “Why do gas prices appear to go up right before a long weekend?”. This question usually comes up before every long weekend we have. We have written several posts about this topic and we wanted to enlighten our readers about it again, as the Victoria Day long weekend is right around the corner. 

We already know that gas prices are affected by a number of factors including cost of crude and the cost of gasoline at the wholesale level. This was the subject of our last post on gas pricing: “Gas Pricing: What Factors Affect the Prices You See At The Pump”. We also have discussed how powerful an effect local competition has on gas prices too in our PumpTalk video: “Why Do Gasoline Prices Go Up and Down?”  

Now, the question at hand – Why do gas prices seem to go up right before a long holiday weekend? Back in June, our post, “Dispelling the myth about long weekend gas price hikes” linked to a report that was released by M.J. Ervin & Associates (a division of the Kent Group). This report reviewed pricing data around long weekends in Canada from the present, back to 2006. In the report, Michael Ervin concluded that: 

    “The aggregated results indicate that week-over-week retail prices are no more likely to increase during the week immediately before a holiday. In fact, our findings revealed that the number of price increases during the week of a holiday was slightly less than that of weeks not related to holidays.” 

You can read the full report here: Report: Holiday Weekends and Fuel Price Increases: Fact or Myth?

The press release can be found here: Holiday Weekends and Fuel Price Increases: Fact or Myth?

We hope this helps, and as always, we welcome comments and feedback from our readers. PumpTalk was created to facilitate the discussion, so let’s keep the conversation going!

- Julie S.