When the federal shutdown began on October 1st, most of the conversation focused on staffing shortages, flight reductions, and long lines. But looking at schedules and headlines doesn’t tell you how people actually moved through airports. So we turned to Advan’s foot traffic data. And because TSA publishes daily passenger screenings, we paired the two together to understand the shutdown from both ground truth and foot-traffic behavior. The story that emerges is surprisingly clear and not always what you’d expect.

Earlier this week we examined how air travel fared during Thanksgiving 2024 (short answer: flat for the last 4 years): https://advanresearch.com/air-travel-steady-during-thanksgiving But as we all know, the other favorable method of travel for Americans is the symbol of freedom: the automobile. Traditionally, Thanksgiving week was the most traffic jammed travelled period of the year. How did this and prior years fare? To get a full picture, here we compare the miles travelled for the whole week, from Saturday before Thanksgiving until Sunday after Thanksgiving, versus the miles traveled for each year (excluding December, for which we don’t have 2024 data yet), so we can see not only the absolute but also the relative trends vs what happens throughout the year.

Between 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.

The World Health Organization officially declared the end to the pandemic in May 2023, more than three years after its initial announcement in March 2020. With the introduction of the vaccine and the gradual lifting of restrictions over the past three years, Americans are trying to return to their pre-pandemic lifestyles, starting with their travel habits. The pandemic years brought political and social change with them, which included the introduction of a bill which officially declared the observance of June 19th (Juneteenth) as a federal holiday in 2021.

As we are into the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic, here are the latest developments in travel industry as of 4/18/2022. Starting off with the US airports, following a strong first quarter of 2022, despite the Omicron wave that led to thousands of flight cancelations, foot traffic picked up steam in March and is on track to hit its highest level in the next days since the beginning of 2022.

The US borders finally opened on November 8. Did that result in a material influx of tourists that will help increase hotel and retail traffic? Not yet… Let’s review 5 airports that showcase both domestic and international travel: LAX and ORD (Chicago O’Hare) that capture international visitors from the Asia-Pacific region, and JFK and EWR (Newark) that capture traffic from Europe; plus LGA (LaGuardia) which has mostly domestic traffic for comparison.

As people start to feel the threat of the new Delta Variant, Southwest Airlines is experiencing its effect firsthand. The COVID-19 pandemic shut down airports worldwide and Southwest was no exception, seeing an 89.65% decrease in foot traffic as measured by Advan between April 2019 and April 2020. According to The Dallas Morning News, “On April 14, 2020, only 87,534 passengers went through Transportation Security Information checkpoints in U.S. airports, the fewest number of travelers since the 1950s.

While many U.S. residents feared public transportation during the COVID-19 pandemic, many started to shop around for a car resulting in driving the demand up, fact that led to a price hike as high as 30%. On the other side, rental car companies sold a big chunk of their fleet in exchange for cash liquidity as the demand for car rentals dropped 70%-80% especially in the early months of this turbulence.

After being grounded for over a year, Americans have begun traveling again. Now, people all over the country are trading the comforts of home with the experiences of hotels, resorts, and casinos. Our research suggests that both these industries have begun to rebound nicely from the pandemic. As of June 2021, foot traffic in hotels and resorts was up 140% over June 2020. Casinos are up 243% since June 2020. Although both sectors have seen great improvements since the peak of the pandemic, however hotels and resorts remain 30% below June 2019 levels, while casinos are still down 23%.

The answer is: Yes and no. Road trips are back but air travel is slower to recover. Using our latest traffic pattern data, some interesting new travel trends emerged over the Memorial Day weekend (MDW) - the unofficial beginning of the summer season for many Americans on the go. We believe this pattern could be a leading indicator for consumer behavior as we move closer to Independence Day in July and the summer vacation period.