LOGINBetween the inherent drive to get away from it all and the fear that you will be squeezed like a sardine / ignored at the counter / trampled by the crowds / have your Luis Vuitton bags smudged / insert your own excuse here, air travel during Thanksgiving has held surprisingly steady over the last 4 years, and just below its all time highs.
Here we utilize cellphone data to measure foot traffic in airport locations and airline terminals. Foot traffic is one of the best metric for airline performance and air travel, because it can show when travelers actually flew – as opposed to credit card transaction data which shows only when the tickets were bought – and it is available the next day, so you can derive insights faster than any other metric.
In the first graph below we see the traffic across all US airports, from the largest international hubs to the smallest regional ones, for the week encompassing Thanksgiving. We measured all traffic from the Friday before Thanksgiving until the Sunday after Thanksgiving, inclusive, because some of us who will remain unnamed take longer vacations than others. You know who you are.
And here is a chart showing the year over year changes, as they are really hard to spot. For all intents and purposes, there have been no changes in the last 4 years:
And while we are at it, how much of that traffic went to major airlines? And which ones have been doing better? American is ahead, with Delta and Southwest following:
Not every airline is performing equally though. In the graph below we show the year over year changes for the last 3 years (as changes during and after the pandemic are not necessarily representative). Some observations that clearly stand out:
• Southwest’s woes are evident. Minus 5% this year, on top of a 6% drop in 2023.
• All small airlines are hurting. This is a case for allowing more mergers of small airlines… United, American and Delta are stealing business from all the others. (There is one exception, Sun Country Airlines, but that is starting from a very low base.)
