Fourth of July travel to return in force as Americans “get life back to life”

(CNN) – The trips this long holiday weekend in the United States will be very crowded, and not only by the standards of the pandemic.

Experts expect it to compete with the busiest Independence Day weekend of the pre-coronavirus era. Lines at airports and traffic jams on highways will return in force, they say.

The American Automobile Association (AAA) expects a record number of Americans to hit the increasingly crowded roads this weekend and warns they will find the most expensive gasoline of July 4. in seven years. America’s airports haven’t been this crowded in more than a year, and some airlines are struggling to keep up with demand.

With crowds at airports and cars on the roads, this weekend is expected to resemble the times before the pandemic rocked the sector.

But memories of the pandemic remain: masks remain mandatory for all passengers, even if vaccinated, on all means of public transport, including airplanes, trains and buses, and in centers such as train stations and airports. Restrictions prevent or complicate international travel to many countries. The cruises have just restarted with some changes on board. And while airlines have returned to selling center seats, many have yet to restore alcoholic beverage service.

“Even our regular passengers are kind of first passengers right now,” Sara Nelson, president of the Flight Attendants Association-CWA, told CNN.

Road trips are more popular than ever

The 47.7 million Americans that AAA expects to travel more than 50 miles between Thursday and Monday compete with the 2019 record number of 48.9 million.

The number of vacationers packing their bags for a road trip, AAA hopes, will be the largest in history: 43.6 million.

That means that the roads at key vacation spots will see an even greater influx of traffic.

Transportation data company Inrix says that many cities, from New York to Los Angeles, are experiencing less traffic than usual this time of year as many employees continue to work from home. Traffic in Washington City is 13 percentage points lower than usual, and in San Francisco it is down 21 percentage points. Both numbers are still higher than this time in 2020, when just 34.2 million people hit the road, AAA said.

But the story is different in the tourist centers of the country. Nine Florida cities, including Tampa and Orlando, are seeing more traffic than usual.

“This is going to be an intense travel season,” said AAA spokesman Andrew Gross.

Among the factors that cause families to take road trips, Gross said, is protecting unvaccinated children from crowded planes or trains, and the high demand for rental cars in places they might have considered air travel. Car rental companies that downsized their fleets when demand declined during the pandemic are now short on supply. This has led to an increase in rental prices, when vehicles are available.

Gasoline prices are also on the rise, and the national average of $ 3.12 this Thursday has been the most expensive since it reached $ 3.66 in 2014. Prices at gas stations reflect more than just demand for gas. fuel, but rather the challenge of getting it at service stations across the country. Some stations may run out of fuel, says AAA.

“It’s not that we have a gasoline supply problem in this country,” Gross said. “There just aren’t enough gas tank drivers available, because during the pandemic there weren’t many deliveries, so these drivers, in high demand, left and found other jobs.”

Unruly skies

Flights in some major tourist spots, such as Nashville and Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, are already exceeding pre-pandemic levels, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) reported Thursday. Officials launched a campaign to hire 6,000 workers, and the agency said it will continue to hire until Labor Day.

The July 4 travel began with one of the busiest days at airports in 16 months.

The TSA reported that it had inspected 2,147,090 passengers on Thursday. This figure does not reach the record of 2.17 million passengers registered last Sunday. The TSA said it expects that record “to be broken over the holiday weekend.”

As the number of passengers increases, so do reports of passengers refusing to follow the crew’s instructions, or even turning violent.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) received this year more than 3,200 reports on unruly passengers and has opened 491 investigations. Over the past 15 years, the FAA has opened an average of 180 investigations a year, and officials say the number of reports submitted was never large enough to warrant a recount.

“Now the public is coming back out and treating flight attendants like punching bags, and they are doing it verbally and physically,” said Nelson of the flight attendants union.

“The conflict is escalating very rapidly,” he added. “Everyone is at stress level 10. Everyone needs a little help right now and we ask everyone to help.”

Airlines that faced an uncertain future last summer are seeing passengers return in droves. United Airlines told CNN that even with business and international travel on the decline, Thursday is the busiest travel day it has seen since the pandemic began.

“The demand for leisure travel is over 100%,” United CEO Scott Kirby told CNN. “Recovery indicates people’s enormous desire to get back to living life.”

Full planes

The planes are almost full. Low-cost airlines, which specialize in transporting people to vacation destinations, expect to see “loading factors in the 1990s,” said Chris Brown, a vice president of the National Association of Air Carriers.

Airlines for America, which represents the largest U.S. airlines, said flights were 89% full last week, compared with 90% for the same week in 2019.

Part of the rebound is driven by passengers using flight credits from canceled trips during the pandemic.

Southwest Airlines and American Airlines said their schedules and staff have been altered by rising demand and the weather. Data from the aviation website FlightAware shows that Southwest canceled or delayed 39,728 flights last month, the most of any US airline. The data shows that American canceled or delayed 36,714 flights.

Southwest has implored flight attendants to take extra trips and offered them double their usual salary. In a memo obtained by CNN, it said “adverse weather conditions” have put crews out of commission for the next flight, and said fewer inter-city flights have made it more difficult to relocate crew members.

“If you are healthy and safe to do so, please help your fellow Cohearts by taking available shifts,” wrote Southwest Executive Vice President Alan Kasher.

American said it will preventively cut 1% of flights on its schedule through mid-July, attributing to bad weather and a shortage of staff. The anticipated changes involve “affecting the least number of customers” and modifying their reservations.

Travelers taking the train, instead, will see more Amtrak services. More trains have recently started running on the east coast and pre-pandemic service was restored on long-distance routes in the west.

Regardless of how travelers decide to leave, they must arm themselves with patience, experts say.

“You’re going to have a lot of company on the road and in the skies and around you at all times,” said Gross of AAA. So hope it’s not always the smoothest, but you’re going to get there and have fun.