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Thanksgiving: Airlines gear up for record-breaking travel
Thanksgiving 2023 is sure gonna be the busiest day of the year. Airlines, specifically are expected to bear the load of travel the most. Read along and plan your travel accordingly.
As per the Transportation Security Administration, about 30 million passengers are expected to travel from November 17 to November 28, 2023. While all forms of travel will be busy due to the upcoming holiday, Airlines are said to have to bear the largest load of passengers this year and executives are all prepared.
Thanksgiving flight numbers are expected to increase from 48,192 during the previous year to 49,606 on the Wednesday before the holiday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The Sunday after the national holiday is expected to be the busiest day during this period with about 2.9 million passengers set to travel through the skies.
Earlier this week, in a travel forecast TSA administrator David Pekoske said, “We are ready for the anticipated volumes and are working closely with our airline and airport partners to make sure we are prepared for this busy holiday travel season,”
While the year-end holidays are the perfect times for travel sources to drum up revenue, carriers have turned to discount fares or scaling back growth as travellers' frantic post-pandemic travel has returned with a bang. On the other hand, carriers are facing higher fuel and labour costs that have eaten up their profits.
Airlines are prepping for the holiday season
For Southwest Airlines, which cancelled 16,700 flights between late 2018 and early 2024 due to severe winter weather, weather preparation is especially important. Other airlines, on the other hand, recovered more rapidly. The Dallas-based airline has been investing in technical advancements and expanding its aircraft's deicing capabilities in order to better reschedule personnel during flight interruptions.
“If your crew is on a three-day rotation and they don’t get out day 1, guess what, day 2, day 3 they’re not there. An airline always has to keep moving. An airline stops moving, and bad things happen,” said Southwest Airlines Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson at the Skift Aviation Forum in Forth Water, Texas.
United Airlines' Chief Customer Officer Linda Jojo also spoke about their preparation process. “We start winter readiness in the summer. We have some of our first meetings when thermometers are at their highest.”
Airfare has decreased
According to airline monitoring website Hopper, Thanksgiving flight discounts are currently averaging $248 for domestic round-trip travel, down from $271 in 2019 and $276 in 2018, months before the Covid-19 outbreak started.
Additionally, airfare has decreased by more than 13% in the latest U.S. inflation report, as per the Department of Labor.
