This is not just a big year for Aspen—by historical standards, it is huge.
Christmas travel is here: What you can expect this holiday season
14.12.2023 - 15:57 / thepointsguy.com / Ed Bastian / Andrew Watterson / Can Expect
Nearly every peak travel period in 2023 brought air travel records, and airports are again bracing for large crowds as the end-of-year holidays approach.
U.S. airlines expect to serve some 39 million passengers between Dec. 20, 2023, and Jan. 2, 2024, according to the airline trade group Airlines for America. That's up 16% from the same period last year.
The Christmas and New Year's rush follows a summer that proved to be the busiest in the Transportation Security Administration's history — a trend that continued over Thanksgiving, when the agency set a single-day record with 2.9 million passengers screened Nov. 26.
"We saw more travelers during this Thanksgiving break than we've seen in our history — not just for Thanksgiving — for any week of holiday peak travel," Ed Bastian, Delta Air Lines' CEO, noted during an appearance this week on CNBC while predicting an "equally strong" December holiday period.
Airlines expect the busiest days to fly will be Dec. 21-22 and Dec. 26-29. That's the Thursday and Friday before Christmas (which will be on a Monday this year) and the four days immediately following the holiday.
Though the TSA likely won't see any one day as busy as the Sunday after Thanksgiving, checkpoints are gearing up for sustained demand over the better part of two weeks, as is typically the case for the year-end holidays.
"We don't usually see the [single-day] volumes that we see around Thanksgiving," Dan Velez, TSA New England spokesperson, said in a recent interview. "But, a week before Christmas, it's going to pick up quite dramatically."
The holiday travel rush won't just play out in the form of crowded airport terminals.
In the skies, airlines will offer 5.6% more scheduled seats on U.S. domestic flights this month versus December 2022, according to data from Cirium. Also, domestic seats are up 2% this month compared with December 2019 — though with airlines offering 12% fewer flights. Airlines are flying larger planes with more capacity, so they can cut the number of flights and still fly more passengers.
Travelers — not to mention the U.S. Department of Transportation — will surely keep a close eye on how airlines perform over the holidays, particularly Southwest Airlines. Last year, a scheduling meltdown in the wake of a winter storm led to Southwest canceling 16,700 flights.
That operational failure drew scrutiny from lawmakers and prompted the carrier to bolster its winter weather equipment on the ground, make investments to improve its technology and overhaul internal decision-making processes — an effort that, Southwest insists, is already making a difference.
"We are now so much better prepared for these extreme weather events," Andrew Watterson, Southwest's chief operating
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