Holiday travel rush begins to wind down at Philadelphia International Airport after Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving may be over, but the holiday travel rush is still going strong on Monday at Philadelphia International Airport. 

“It’s always scary to travel around this time of the year because there are so many people traveling at the same time,” said John LaRose, who was returning home to Upper Chichester after spending Thanksgiving in Florida.

While Sunday was expected to be the busiest of the Thanksgiving holiday travel days, officials at PHL anticipated Monday coming in at a close second.

“We were looking at about 96,000 people traveling into or out of PHL today,” PHL Public Affairs Manager Heather Redfern said.

People traveling out of PHL Monday found long lines at TSA checkpoints. But many people CBS Philadelphia talked with planned and were in pretty good spirits.

“Yeah, it wasn’t too bad, but it was busy enough, you know what I mean? But I’m on an Eagles high so I’m good,” said Shawn Coles, who was heading to Houston.

“Coming here, we were 9 to boarding, so that was stressful,” said David Arroyo, who said he wanted to give himself some extra time this time around.

Plenty of people were also returning to the Philadelphia area after spending the holiday away. LaRose was coming home from Florida, with a stop in Atlanta.

“Everything went according to plan, surprisingly, and I made it back on time, so I’m very thankful for that,” LaRose said.

But Ashok and his family from Monroe Township, New Jersey, didn’t have as good a time in Atlanta.

“We came like two hours before the time, and it was, we barely made our flight,” Ashok said. “We literally barely made our flight with the TSA checking and all of that.”

The good news for travelers was that delays at PHL were fairly sparse on Monday. Officials said they expected this Thanksgiving travel volume to be 12% higher than 2023 and just 2% behind 2019’s pre-pandemic levels.

But the holiday rush did come with one pretty significant issue at the airport. Terminal D lost power late last week from what officials now say was a “fault in the cabling system.” A generator was brought in and power was restored.

But on Sunday, that generator failed, leading to another outage in the terminal for a few hours.

Officials say a second generator was brought in to restore power, which is still running the terminal as of Monday evening.

“Everything is up and running in Terminal D. There has not been any issues since 5:30 last night when we brought the second generator in,” Redfern said.

PHL officials say the cabling system issue is being worked on, and they hope to have power restored through that by Tuesday.