Travelers wait in line to check in for their flights at a Delta Airlines ticket counter at Orlando International Airport during the busy Christmas holiday season on December 28, 2022 in Orlando, Florida.
Paul Hennessy | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Airlines expect record travel demand this Thanksgiving. Executives say they’re prepared for the hordes.
The Transportation Security Administration expects to screen 30 million passengers from Nov. 17 through Nov. 28, the most ever. The Sunday after Thanksgiving is expected to be the busiest day during that period with an estimated 2.9 million passengers taking to the skies.
“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,” TSA Administrator David Pekoske said in a travel forecast earlier this week.
The year-end holidays are a crucial time for airlines to drum up revenue. Outside of peak holiday or other high-demand periods, carriers have turned to discounting fares or scaling back growth as consumers’ frenetic post-pandemic travel settles back to historical norms. Meanwhile, carriers are facing higher fuel and labor costs that have eaten into their profits.
But coveted travel days around the holidays can still command steep fares.
And Thanksgiving will be a test to see how the aviation industry handles the year-end holidays while still managing strains like a prolonged shortage of air traffic controllers.
The holiday period kicks off nearly a year after a winter storm triggered thousands of flight cancellations around Christmas. Carriers have spent months preparing to ensure that costly missteps don’t reoccur.
Weather readiness is particularly key for Southwest Airlines, which canceled 16,700 flights late last year and in early 2024 following severe winter weather, while other airlines recovered more quickly. The Dallas-based carrier has been spending on increasing aircraft de-icing capabilities and improving technology to better reschedule crews during flight disruptions.
“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,” Southwest Airlines Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson told reporters at the Skift Aviation Forum in Fort Worth, Texas, earlier this month. “An airline always has to keep moving. An airline stops moving, and bad things happen.”
Prep isn’t limited to Southwest.
“We start winter readiness in the summer,” said
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