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Thanksgiving Travel Down, Prices Going Up Anyway

November 17, 2009 at 3:34 PM | by | Comments (0)

Fewer than one in five Americans are planning to cut back on their Thanksgiving spending, but almost one-third are curbing their overall holiday travel this season. That's not going to devastate the airline world, since a lot of that travel would have happened by car anyway. And to be honest we kind of like the excuse: "sorry uncle and aunt so and so—we'd love to come over and have our annual fight about whether Obama's birth certificate is real, but we just can't afford the gas in this recession."

But the scaling back is still going to be enough to take a bite out of the industry:

U.S. airlines expect Thanksgiving air travel to be down 4 percent from a year earlier as consumer frugality and challenging finances take a toll on spending. ...'The recent announcement that U.S. unemployment surpassed 10 percent highlights one of the key factors impacting consumer buying decisions,' Air Transport Association of America CEO James May said. The nation's jobless rate hit 10.2 percent in October, the highest since 1983.

Of course the decrease in demand isn't going to stop airlines from hiking up their prices anyway, something that's already kicking in. So if you were planning on traveling you're not going to see many price benefits. Airports might be very slightly less crowded, though the Thanksgiving crush is so overwhelming—and depends so much on Back East weather—that you probably won't notice any differences there either.

Basically the news this morning, as it has been for a while now, is that the airline industry is hosed but that there's no upshot to consumers even in the short term. Happy holidays!

[Photo: Jérôme / Wiki Commons]

Related Stories:
· Airlines expect 4% drop in Thanksgiving travel [Business First]
· Airline Industry Coverage [Jaunted]
· Airline News [Jaunted]

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