This Year’s Holiday Air Travel Might Be … Good? No, That Can’t Be Right.

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One of the defining transportation stories of the past few years has been, without a doubt, how much air travel has sucked post-COVID. The breakdowns in cybersecurity, air-traffic control, staffing capacity, and climate-changed weather resilience have made even short domestic trips a miserable experience.

As we round out another frustrating year of air travel, it might appear that we’re headed into the Christmas season with bad tidings still to come. AAA projects that nearly 8 million Americans will take flights during the last couple of weeks of the year, breaking the December holiday-travel record. With the Federal Aviation Administration still facing personnel shortages for essential jobs like traffic control, and even state transportation officials unable to fill positions for basic airport upkeep, will our planes be able to ensure that you will be home for Christmas?

The good news is, despite all the complaints and remaining kinks, the air-transit experience has improved this year. As the FAA reported in July, “The flight cancellation rate for the first half of 2024 was just 1.4%—nearly the lowest rate in over a decade.” That was true in spite of the record passenger traffic this summer, as the Transportation Security Administration recorded higher numbers of average daily passengers this year than even in 2019. Unfortunately, this summer did end with a chaotic Labor Day season, as nationwide bad weather disrupted a historically busy travel period with hundreds of cancellations and thousands of delays, accentuated by a radar outage at Newark Liberty International Airport that delayed several inbound flights.

However, the events surrounding a different holiday may provide a better indicator as to what will happen during the next few weeks: Thanksgiving. On Dec. 1, the tail end of the turkey-day weekend, the TSA recorded its single busiest day of the year, screening about 3.09 million flyers and breaking the passenger and air-traffic records reached during Thanksgiving 2023. Late November has never seen a more jam-packed season, with 232,000 flights recorded on Thanksgiving week; only 0.5 percent of flights were canceled, and 83 percent of trips met their planned schedules. Even a well-timed early-week strike by workers at the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, didn’t hold passengers up too much.

The historically crowded post–Black Friday weekend saw a touch more trouble, with snowstorms contributing to delays and the FAA taking special care to manage air traffic in Florida and New Jersey. Still, despite that last moment of disarray, passengers had something extra to cushion the blow: apology money.

About a month before Thanksgiving, the Biden administration implemented new rules requiring carriers to distribute timely and automatic cash refunds—not travel vouchers or credits!—to passengers forced to deal with severely delayed (i.e., by more than three hours) or canceled flights. Refunds were also mandated for delayed delivery of checked-in baggage. It might not have made disrupted travel timelines any more convenient, but at least customers no longer have to worry about diving through horrific bureaucracy and jammed-up customer-service lines to earn back the money they’re entitled to.

2024 saw 10 of the most congested days in U.S. travel history, but thankfully, the air industry’s gradual improvements managed to mitigate the worst-case scenarios we’ve seen over the past few years. That doesn’t mean there aren’t lingering problems that need urgent redress over the long term: an underfunded FAA that, thanks to congressional obstruction, is still unable to appropriately hire and train staff for essential positions and upgrade all its facilities to the latest technology; a profit crisis for cheaper carriers that bankrupted Spirit Airlines and is pushing JetBlue to hike fares; continued stinginess from the bigger airlines when it comes to properly compensating overworked staffers in all fields (e.g., attendants, ground crew, custodians). As GOP lawmakers continue to push for FAA budget cuts and broader deregulation, it’s highly unlikely that the incoming Trump administration will improve anything in this regard.

Still, the steep drops in cancellations from this summer and fall should be a relief to fliers prepping for their Christmas travel, as is the fact that airlines, airports, and regulators haven’t stopped working all month to stay ready for what will inevitably be another record-breaking holiday season [DJ Holiday voice]. Just make sure you keep a close eye on those weather forecasts.

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