flight delays

What to expect for holiday travel

Holidays, , , , , ,

(This is a shortened version of a story we first wrote for NBC News)

This year’s post-pandemic travel boom is continuing into the holidays.

Nearly half (48%) of Americans plan to travel between Thanksgiving and mid-January, up from 31% last winter, a recent Deloitte survey found.

AAA expects 55.4 million travelers to venture at least 50 miles from home during the Thanksgiving period alone, a 2.3% increase from last year.

That means if you’re hitting the roads or the slopes this season, you’ll have lots of company. Here’s what to expect as you pack your bags for a winter getaway.

More affordable airfare

Airline ticket prices are falling even as more Americans intend to fly.

Deloitte found that 33% of holiday travelers plan to take a domestic flight, up from 29% last year. Despite the strong demand, airfares were more than 13% cheaper last month than at the same time a year ago, federal inflation data shows.

Smoother flights?

Airlines and aviation officials sound confident about handling the holiday crush. While major U.S. carriers — including American, Delta, and United — expect record passenger numbers this Thanksgiving, many are touting their readiness for the season.

Track records for flight cancellations and missing luggage have improved ahead of the holidays. About 1.7% of flights were canceled during the first eight months of this year. That’s much better than the 3.0% rate for the same eight-month period last year and 2.3% in the comparable stretch of 2019, the Department of Transportation reported.

And in August, the latest month with available data, the mishandled baggage rate dropped to 0.61% from 0.75% the month before.

A broader push to streamline and automate operations “will continue to help curb mishandling as we approach the holiday season,” said Nicole Hogg, head of baggage for SITA, an air transport IT company. But travel experts still suggest adding an AirTag or other digital tracking device to your luggage, especially during busy travel periods.

“Mother Nature will cause some number of cancellations, guaranteed,” said Scott Keyes, the founder of the airfare tracking site Going. But he noted that “cancellations caused by the airlines — the most galling for travelers — are at multiyear lows” and added that many carriers have bulked up on pilots, planes, and staff.

“The entire industry was snakebit from last year’s debacle,” Keyes said, “and airlines have adjusted their operations accordingly.”

Pricier hotel rooms

More holiday travelers plan to stay in hotels this holiday season instead of bunking with friends or family. Deloitte found that 56% plan to stay in hotels, a sharp jump from 35% in 2022.

That could push up room rates, which were already 0.8% pricier in October than the year before.

Jan Freitag, director of hospitality analytics at the commercial real-estate research company CoStar, said this season’s strong travel numbers will likely nudge Christmastime room rates above last year’s levels. In the first full week of November, they were up 4% in the U.S. from the same week a year ago, averaging $156 per night, CoStar said.

Price-conscious Christmas travelers might want to “book early to lock in lower rates, shorten their trips or trade down to a different class of service,” said Freitag, or else take their chances with last-minute reservations. Inventories will be slimmer in the eleventh hour, but hotels may still cut prices on unsold rooms.

FAA Outage Causes Flight Delays & Disruption

Airlines, ,

Late Tuesday evening, an essential piece of the aviation transportation network operated by the Federal Aviation Administration failed.

And because of that the FAA temporarily grounded all flights nationwide on Wednesday morning.

The ground stop was lifted by 8:50 am east coast time. But the fallout included more than 1,300 canceled flights and close to 10,500 delayed flights over the course of the day, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.

And, as we know, when that happens, it can take a few days for flight schedules to fully get back in order.

What went wrong?

The FAA’s Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system, which provides critical safety and operational information to pilots stopped working. And without that information, it wasn’t safe for any planes to take from any airport.

After the reboot, flights resumed. And by Wednesday evening, the FAA issued a statement with some explanation of what went wrong and a reassurance that the agency wasn’t the victim of a cyber-attack. The agency also promises to ‘further pinpoint’ what went wrong, and “prevent this kind of disruption from happening again.”

“The FAA is continuing a thorough review to determine the root cause of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage. Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber attack. The FAA is working diligently to further pinpoint the causes of this issue and take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again.”

Now What?

Passengers whose flights were canceled are owed refunds by the airlines, even though this was an FAA-induced incident. Most airlines are waiving change fees and allowing ticketed passengers to change plans and trying to rebook passengers on other flights. If your travel plans were disrupted, be sure to see if the credit card you used to book the flight has some sort of travel delay insurance. Here are links to the Travel Alert page for many airlines.

Alaska Airlines

American Airlines

Delta Air Lines

Frontier Airlines

JetBlue

Delta Air Lines

Southwest Airlines

United Airlines

Water pipe break at JFK piles on the misery

Airports,

As if the flight delays, diversions and cancellations from last week’s nor’easter weren’t enough to ruin a gazillion travel plans into the middle of next week for travelers hoping to fly into and out of New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, on Sunday afternoon a water pipe burst at JFK Terminal 4, sending  several inches of water into the arrivals area of Terminal 3, which serves Delta, Virgin Atlantic and more than two dozen other international airlines.

For safety reasons, electricity to the terminal was shut down, and that meant delayed flights, stranded passengers, diverted flights  – and a big pile-up of baggage.

To make matters worse – there’s more bad weather on the way and some airlines have issued a new round of change fee waivers and cancellation alerts for Atlanta and some northeast and mid-Atlantic airports.  Here are links to some of the alerts posted by airlines late Sunday evening:

Delta Air Lines

JetBlue

Southwest Airlines

United Airlines

As always, be sure to check with your airline to see what’s up before heading to the airport. And stay safe.

At JFK T7 Sheraton is rewarding delays

Free Stuff, Fun Stuff, Holidays, , ,

Sheraton kiosk

Next week Sheraton Hotels and Resorts will be at JFK Airport Terminal 7 giving travelers prizes for their flight delays.

From Monday, Dec. 21 through Thursday Dec. 24, Sheraton will invite travelers to scan their plane tickets at a “Delight my Delay” kiosk for a chance to convert their delayed minutes into prizes such as resort vacations in Waikiki, cameras, drones, gift cards and more.

There’s also an option to get double prizes and pay one forward to another traveler.

Stuck at … IAH Airport

Delays,

IAH airport

Travel enough and you’ll have one of those days when a short flight delay turns into a long one.

Then that long delay turns into an unreasonably long one.

And then the airline informs you that, contrary to what the mechanics have been saying for the past three or four hours, the airplane you’ve been sitting on isn’t going to fly.

And then you’re in line with a lot of really cranky people at the customer service desk waiting for a hotel voucher so you can try again in the morning.

After a forty minute wait for the hotel van, you arrive at the hotel the customer service agent described as “really, really nice, you’ll love it!” to discover that it’s a really creepy hotel with a no-smoking floor that reeks of smoke.

But you consider yourself lucky, because the front desk clerk exchanges your food voucher for the bar’s last bottle of wine which, she admits, the bartender ran out to buy at the grocery store because the bar had somehow run dry.

iah wine (2)