Thanksgiving Travel Down, Prices Going Up Anyway

November 17, 2009 at 3:34 PM | by Omri | 1 Comment

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: J�r�me / Wiki Commons]

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

1 Comment

Return to » Thanksgiving Travel Down, Prices Going Up Anyway

ArethaF
Jaunted Member

Unemployed Hope...
A tough economy like this is making every American families crippled with finances, especially now that Christmas is fast approaching. Now, the unemployed sector cuts through a very broad cross-section of the country. Since late 2007, some 8 million jobs have vanished, and the end is not yet in sight. The ranks of the unemployed have now swelled to nearly 16 million people. In the past, recessions have mostly hit blue collar and low level retail jobs, and white collar layoffs accounted for about 30 percent of job losses. By way of contrast, in the current downturn, nearly 50% of the vanished jobs have been managerial, professional, and skilled white-collar positions. Barring something truly unforeseeable, such as the creation of a whole new economy, we are likely to see an unprecedented recessionary shift toward permanent job losses.

December 9, 2009 at 4:25 AM

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