The weekend after Thanksgiving met the expectations that it would be the busiest travel period in the United States since the coronavirus pandemic began, aided by clement weather and lower gas prices that encouraged some to drive rather than fly, reported The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Monday.
The number of travelers from Nov. 25 through Nov. 29 was down more than 10 percent from a record set last year, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA), which includes flights and road trips of more than 50 miles.
Airlines, which boosted capacity earlier in the month only to trim flying when cancellations started to climb in recent weeks, said traveler numbers were in line with their revised expectations.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said that its workers screened more than 964,000 people on Saturday, down 37 percent from a year earlier, and more than a million on Nov. 25, the busiest flying day since March. TSA said that it expected screenings on Sunday to be higher than that.
Travel flows were helped by the lack of winter storms that blighted travel last year, triggering thousands of scrubbed flights in the Northeast and the East Coast, reported WSJ. Only around 200 flights were scrubbed across the country over the weekend, with the total number of flights down by around a half from a year ago.
Almost 50 million people were expected to have made a journey during the Thanksgiving holidays, said AAA prior to the current holiday season, despite tightening local clampdowns and warnings from federal health officials.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Nov. 19 recommended people not travel over Thanksgiving, for it would fuel the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic which has killed more than 267,000 people so far in the United States.
