Thanksgiving Travel Numbers Will Down, Of Course. But Will Current Covid Spike Make Them Even Worse?

Next week 50 million Americans – about 15% of the nation’s population – will travel to visit relatives or friends, or to otherwise celebrate Thanksgiving, accord to AAA’s annual holiday travel forecast.

Or, maybe, they won’t.

Amidst the recent and continuing spike in the number of Covid-19 cases being reported in most states – along with spikes in Covid-19 hospitalizations and even deaths caused at least in part by Covid-19 – making such a forecast has become a bit of a crap shoot. Like everything else, it seems, in pandemic-disrupted 2020 not only are Thanksgiving travel totals this year going to be way down from recent years’ totals, they’re also subject a potentially large last-minute swing in either direction. While it would seem most likely that the actual total of holiday travelers will fall well short of these “forecasted” numbers, it’s also possible, in theory, that the totals could jump should the spike in reported illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths plummet unexpectedly over the next seven days.

AAA, the nationwide organization that provides service to members who get stranded by car breakdowns on the road, also is one of the nation’s larger travel agencies and, in some states, a major provider of auto and other insurance coverage. For decades now it has issued arguably the most accurate forecasts of the number of people traveling over major U.S. holidays. But even the folks at AAA metaphorically are throwing up their hands in frustration trying to nail down this year’s Thanksgiving travel forecast.

A month ago, AAA’s forecast team was zeroing in on a prediction of 50 million Thanksgiving holiday travelers in the U.S. this year. That would be about a 5 million-person drop from the 55 million who traveled over the holiday in 2009. But given the huge drop in the number of people traveling this year by air, rail and cruise ships – offset by the historical dominance of car travel on the family-oriented Thanksgiving holiday – that seemed to them like a reasonable, even surprisingly-large number.

Despite some health and government officials and organizations urging Americans to tone down their Turkey Day traditions this year, and in some cases to cancel outright their Thanksgiving gatherings in light of the pandemic, the likelihood that 50 million Americans still would risk traveling to give thanks with others this year seemed almost like a triumph of American grit in the face of adversity.

Since then, however, the coronavirus has burst back onto the American scene in a very big way. All but one of the 50 states now are seeing daily increases – big increases in about half of them – in the number of newly reported cases. On Sunday the nation hit a new high of 69,864 people with Covid-19 being hospitalized. That’s according to the Covid-19 Tracking Project. That topped the spring peak of 59,940 Covid-19 hospitalizations on April 15, by nearly 17%.

Over the past week the nation has averaged reporting 148,725 new Covid-19 cases per day, according to Johns Hopkins University of Medicine’s Coronavirus Resource Center. That’s a 31% increase in new cases from the previous week.

And with that big jump in Covid-19 numbers nationally, AAA’s ability to accurately forecast the number of Thanksgiving travelers this year was greatly compromised. Thus, the company resorted to adding a disclaimer, of sorts, to its 2020 Thanksgiving forecast. It said that because of the spike in Covid-19 cases, renewed quarantine restrictions in some locales across the nation, and new, stronger warnings from the U.S. Center for Disease Control “the actual number of holiday travelers will be even lower” than the 50 million AAA had planned to forecast.

“The wait-and-see travel trend continues to impact final travel decisions, especially for the Thanksgiving holiday,” said Paula Twidale, AAA’s Senior Vice President, Travel, said. “The decision to travel is a personal one. For those who are considering making a trip, the majority will go by car, which provides the flexibility to modify holiday travel plans up until the day of departure.”

Those who do travel for Thanksgiving this year are, as always, far more likely to drive than to fly or go by other means. But the car vs. other means breakdown this year will be far more pronounced this year not only because consumers are themselves far less likely to take public transportation out of fear of becoming infected, but also because the options for public transportation are far more limited. Travel companies have greatly reduced their available capacity in response to historically weak demand and the tens of millions of dollars many such companies are losing every day.

U.S. domestic air travel capacity is down about 65% from a year ago. AAA says it expects to see 2.4 million air travelers over the holiday period, down about 50% from Thanksgiving 2019.

Rail capacity, which in the best of times is a tiny fraction of air travel capacity, is down even more. And cruise ship capacity is effectively nil, with all cruises departing from U.S. ports effectively suspended until early 2019

Even then, AAA says Thanksgiving travel by automobile will be off 4.3% from last year and should total no more than 47.8 million people. And potentially the total could be a lot less than that if the current spike in Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations continues right up until the holiday itself, causing more Americans to cancel their plans at the last minute.  In any case, about 95% of all Thanksgiving travel this year will be done by car.

Whatever the total number of Thanksgiving travelers this year turns out to be, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be the biggest one-year decline since at least Thanksgiving 2008, when the so-called “Great Recession” was at its peak and cut deeply into Thanksgiving travel demand.

AAA’s Thanksgiving travel forecast long has served as a benchmark for economists, business leaders and planners, and reporters covering the economy going into the key Christmas shopping season. But it’s not the only such forecast.

Last week TripAdvisor.com, a major online travel selling platform, forecast a 14 percentage point drop in the number of Americans who will travel this Thanksgiving season as a result of the coronavirus and the various travel warnings and restrictions related to it in various destinations.

But, interestingly, TripAdvisor said that while only four U.S. cities are targeted by more people this year as Thanksgiving destinations than in previous years, all four of them are up-scale and increasingly popular sunbelt vacation destinations: Key Largo and Key West, Fla., and Sedona and Scottsdale, Ariz.

Conversely, many of the nation’s biggest cities will see a sharp drops in the number of Thanksgiving visitors. TripAdvisor calculates that New York City’s visitor traffic over Thanksgiving will be down 80%, more than any other destination.

That jives with research from Amadeus, one of the world’s largest online travel selling platforms and provider of technology to airlines, hotels and other travel companies. Katie Moro, Vice President of Data Partnerships for Amadeus’s hospitality business, said top Thanksgiving holiday vacation destinations this year tend to be secondary or even tertiary vacation destinations in warm climates warm climates that lend themselves well to social distancing and outdoor activities. Such top destination markets include : Moab, Utah; Sedona, Ariz.; and Key West, Fla., where Amadeus shows hotel occupancies already book at 70% or higher rates with a week still to go until Thanksgiving. On the other side of the coin, Moro said locations from which appears the largest number of people departing for their Thanksgiving vacations are all large, heavily populated metropolitan areas including, greater New York City, greater Los Angeles, great Atlanta, the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, greater Chicago, greater Houston, great Washington, D.C., the Miami-and-South Florida region, the San Francisco Bay area, and greater Philadelphia.