Thanksgiving 2023 is surely going to be the busiest day of the year. Airlines are specifically expected to bear the load of travel the most. Therefore read along and plan your travel accordingly.
As per the Transportation Security Administration, about 30 million passengers are expected to travel from 18th to 28th November, 2023. While due to the upcoming holiday all forms of travel will be busy, 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 according to the Federal Aviation Administration, from 48,192 during the previous year to 49,606 on the Wednesday before the holiday.
The busiest day during this period is expected to be the Sunday after the national holiday with about 2.9 million passengers set to travel through the skies. Airlines were getting ready for the anticipated volumes and were working closely with their airport partners to make sure they were prepared for this busy holiday travel season.
Carriers have turned to discount fares or scaling back growth as travellers’ frantic post-pandemic travel has returned with a bang, while the year-end holidays are the perfect times for travel sources to drum up revenue. Â Carriers, on the other hand, are facing higher fuel and labour costs that have eaten up their profits.
For Southwest Airlines, which cancelled 16,700 flights between late 2018 and early 2024 due to severe winter weather, weather preparation is especially important while other airlines recovered more rapidly. The airline has been investing in technical advancements and expanding its aircraft’s deicing capabilities in order to better reschedule personnel during flight interruptions.
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, according to airline monitoring website Hopper.
