More holiday travelers will pack airports and highways this Thanksgiving as a drop in airfare and gas prices stokes the nation’s busiest travel time of the year.
Even as travel demand holds strong, a severe weather forecast threatens to cause flight delays and traffic jams across swaths of the country. Transportation experts are urging people to be patient and to expect delays.
“For many Americans, Thanksgiving and travel go hand in hand, and this holiday, we expect more people on the roads, skies and seas compared to 2022,” Paula Twidale, senior vice president of AAA Travel, said in a statement. “Travel demand has been strong all year.”
AAA, the automobile owners’ group that also tracks air travel, expects that 4.7 million people will fly between Wednesday and Sunday. That is an increase of 6.6 percent compared with last year, and the highest number of Thanksgiving air travelers in nearly two decades.