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Thanksgiving Holiday Travel Dashboard & Tips
Thanksgiving week (Monday through Sunday) has long been a notorious travel week within the United States. Over the years, airline carriers consistently grew their schedules and added new routes, peaking in 2019 with 160,755 scheduled flights over the holiday week and 8,181 unique routes.
As the airline industry operated record numbers of flights, cancellations and delays started to pile up. From 2017 to 2018, US domestic cancellations increased by 1,400 flights (274 cancellations in 2017 to 1,674 in 2018). Domestic travel was disrupted again in 2019 when a coast-to-coast winter storm caused widespread delays and cancellations on the Saturday and Sunday after Thanksgiving.
FlightAware Travel Recommendations
This year, as travelers around the states start to prepare for their Thanksgiving travel, we recommend using the FlightAware website and/or the FlightAware App. FlightAware will give any traveler the insight they need to always know where their flight is and if it has been delayed or cancelled.
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By opening a free account that takes about one minute to create, holiday travelers can receive updates to know when a flight arrives, departs, and also know when an airplane is on the ground, but perhaps not yet at the gate. A great feature is “Where is my plane now?” It allows passengers to know exactly where their aircraft is and provide a broader picture. For example, if the gate information says your flight is departing on time in forty-five minutes, but you can see on FlightAware that the jet is still a half-hour out from landing, you can plan accordingly, knowing that you’re unlikely to depart on time.
Information is power. Knowing sometimes even before the airlines do of where your aircraft is and when it will be at the gate means you can look for alternative flights, if necessary, before other passengers even know a flight is delayed or cancelled.
The early bird gets airborne, statistically, with less delays and fewer cancellations. As the day wears on, airlines have fewer options for passengers, which is why if you really need to be on time, taking the morning flight is often your best bet.
Interactive Thanksgiving Holiday Travel Dashboard
For more information on Thanksgiving holiday travel, view FlightAware’s interactive holiday dashboard and see what Thanksgiving travel looked like in your area over the past five years.
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FlightAware (flightaware.com) is the leading provider of real-time and historical flight information and insights to the global aviation community. FlightAware serves all segments of the aviation marketplace through best-in-class applications and data services that provide comprehensive information about the current and predicted movement of aircraft. Through the collection, interpretation, and enrichment of hundreds of sources of data, including data from FlightAware’s own proprietary terrestrial ADS-B network with tens of thousands of receivers spanning seven continents in 200 countries and territories, FlightAware transforms millions of raw flight data elements and delivers them as coherent, easy-to-consume flight stories. As a single source of accurate and actionable data for aviation players large and small, FlightAware is Central to Aviation™. FlightAware is privately held, with headquarters in Houston and sales offices in New York, Austin, Singapore, and London.
Kathleen Bangs, Marketing Director
11 Greenway Plaza, Suite 2900
Houston, TX 77046
Tel: 713.622.9958
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