Holiday travel may hit record levels
YOUNGSTOWN
AAA is projecting a record volume of holiday travel this year, with 94.5 million people, 30 percent of all Americans, expected to travel at least 50 miles from home.
That is a 0.6 percent increase of half a million people from last year’s holiday season, and it marks the fifth consecutive year of increased travel volume.
Typically, year-end travel remains relatively stable from year to year. Economic conditions and gas prices are not usually a factor, because people plan their trips in advance.
“It’s such a long holiday, and people have vacation days saved up,” said Bevi Powell, vice president of community relations for AAA East Central, which covers a five-state region that includes Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia and Kentucky.
In the past decade, travel volume has changed at a rate greater than 5 percent only once. That was a decrease in 2007, when Americans first started to feel the pain of the Great Recession.
AAA representatives attribute the slight increase in this year’s travel volume in large part to a longer holiday season.
Because Christmas falls on a Wednesday this year, people have had greater flexibility to plan holiday travel, she said. AAA usually defines the year-end travel season as lasting 11 days, but this year, the season lasts 12 days from Dec. 21 to Jan. 1.
“For the first time in three years, the holiday period covers 12 days instead of 11, providing people with an extra day to visit family and friends or squeeze in a year-end vacation,” Jim Lehman, president of AAA East Central, said in a statement earlier this month.
Mary Ann Dwyer, owner and operator of family-owned Tippecanoe Travel Services in Youngstown, said the holiday travel season has been a busy one for the office, which focuses primarily on family and leisure getaways this time of year.
“They work hard, and they want to go,” she said.
All-inclusive vacations to warm destinations such as Disney World, Mexico and the Caribbean have been particularly popular this year, she said. But the bulk of the trips she has planned start after the new year and extend into the winter months.
Not surprisingly, the car will be the most-popular mode of transportation. AAA says 85.8 million people will hit the roads, a 0.9 percent increase from last year when 85.1 million Americans drove to their holiday destination.
Meanwhile, air travel is expected to fall by 1.4 percent to 5.5 million travelers during the holiday season, a decrease Powell attributed to still-unsavory economic conditions.
Dwyer said there are fewer airlines out there this year, after big mergers in the industry. She has seen the cost of flights go up, too, even exceeding the price of cruise ships.
An additional 3.1 million people will travel by rail, bus, cruise ship or other modes of transportation this year, AAA said.
Americans are expected to travel an average of 805 miles round trip this year, 45 miles more than in 2012.
Gas prices, hovering around the $3.16 per gallon mark in Youngstown, are not likely to impact travel plans, Powell said. But they may affect how people budget for their trips.
Still, AAA is projecting median spending to stay on par with last year.
The year-end travel season is consistently the busiest of the year, according to AAA projections. It is followed by Memorial Day and Thanksgiving, when the organization expects 44 million and 34 million Americans to travel for vacation, respectively.