Savvy travelers usually avoid holiday travel if they can. There’s a reason. Holiday travel is the absolute worst. Everybody wants to get home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or the New Year. When you get millions and millions of people all wanting to travel during a short period of time, it’s a recipe for stress and frustration.
And often the weather doesn’t cooperate, either. Weather delays are common during the Christmas and New Year travel days. There are fewer weather delays during Thanksgiving travel days, but that doesn’t mean that they’re nonexistent.
There’s more news coverage of flight delays and cancellations. We see pictures of frustrated and stranded passengers waiting in airports, but they’re also stranded and frustrated at bus terminals and train stations. Moving the enormous number of people who want to travel in such a small time frame is a logistical nightmare.
Amazingly, the airlines, bus lines, and trains do an amazing job of getting people where they want to go. We see and hear about the failures, but nobody ever tells us how many people actually go to where they wanted to go without a problem. Most travelers do travel without any real problems during the high-travel holiday seasons. They don’t make the news.
The secret to successful holiday travel is planning ahead. Make your reservations early, and as early as possible. Choose to travel during non-peak travel hours. If at all possible, schedule your travel a day ahead of the high travel day. Traveling on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, either early morning or late night will cost less, and the air terminal, train depot, or bus station will be far less crowded. Check-in will be twice as fast, too.
We all want to be home for the holidays, and that means there’ll be a lot more people traveling, so advance planning is the best idea to achieve successful, non-stressful holiday travel.
Holiday Travel
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