Sunday Became US Air Travel’s Busiest Day Since the Start of the Pandemic

November 29, the Sunday that closed out the 2020 Thanksgiving holiday travel window, proved to be the single busiest day for U.S. air travel since the pandemic started in mid-March.

Checkpoint data from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) showed that nearly 1.18 million passengers were screened that day, as many Americans headed home from the destinations where they’d spent Thanksgiving weekend. Those numbers represent roughly 41 percent of the 2.9 million flyers that the TSA had screened on the same day in 2019, which also set a record for U.S. travel at the time.

Since the pandemic crisis first decimated the air travel industry in March, there have been only five days in which the TSA screened more than one million passengers, with four of those occurring during the Thanksgiving holiday period. Within that window, which commenced on the Friday before the holiday, over 9.4 million people passed through TSA airport checkpoints all over the country.

Prior to the holiday, AAA had predicted that 95 percent of those expected to travel over the Thanksgiving period—nearly 48 million Americans—would be going by car, according to CNN Travel.

“Travel by private car—generally regarded as one of the safest and most available means of leisure travel during the pandemic—had begun establishing itself as a leading indicator of travel’s rebound,” said Cree Lawson, CEO of Arrivalist, which tracks the GPS signals of consumers taking road trips of 50 miles or more.

Arrivalist’s Daily Travel Index data that was collected over the Thanksgiving travel window indicated a 35-percent drop in U.S. road trips, when compared to the same period last year. In terms of road-tripping, that actually makes Thanksgiving the least-traveled major holiday of 2020 thus far, since road-trip volumes during the Fourth of July and Labor Day periods were seen to nearly match or even exceed 2019 levels.

Possibly, at least some portion of the public seems to have heeded dire warnings issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) the week before Thanksgiving, which urged Americans to stay home and forgo visiting friends and relatives amid the ongoing, severe surge in COVID-19 cases occurring across the country.