Regardless of excessive gasoline costs, AAA anticipated most individuals to journey by automobile this vacation weekend. Nevertheless, the variety of those that fly is growing once more.
COLUMBIA, SC — One in all America’s greatest journey holidays of the 12 months was anticipated to have extra individuals touring this 12 months than we have seen up to now two years.
AAA predicted that three million individuals would take a flight this Memorial Day weekend.
Nevertheless, airports throughout the nation, together with Columbia Metropolitan Airport, nonetheless noticed 9% fewer passengers than in 2019.
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“He is fairly sluggish at this time, I simply bought right here, so I do not know if he’ll get well or not,” mentioned midfielder Moises Flores.
The airport’s director of promoting, Kim Crafton, tells me the terminals noticed a fraction of what they usually do on Memorial Day.
“Over this weekend, taking a look at Friday, Saturday and Sunday, we have seen about eight,000 individuals come by way of our airport, which is a very sturdy quantity for us. This time of 12 months has traditionally been a robust journey season. and post-pandemic … we’re beginning to see a rise within the variety of individuals coming again,” Crafton defined.
On Monday, the common wait time to get by way of a TSA safety checkpoint was 5 minutes within the afternoon and 10 minutes for early morning flights.
Airport employees say the airport is often crowded this time of 12 months with individuals making an attempt to get to their summer time journey locations however, after two years of battling the COVID-19 pandemic, the airport nonetheless sees Some questions on journey.
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“As everyone knows, air journey actually went down when the pandemic hit, and we have been working actually onerous to try to get our numbers again to the place they have been earlier than 2020.”
Nevertheless, for some individuals who journey, like Jaeyda López, she says that the pandemic was a motivating issue to journey.
“That is what it has been for COVID no less than for me, I have not seen my household so I used to be like ‘okay no less than for this 12 months we’ll lastly have the ability to do it’ after which we are able to go on a street journey or one thing.” go forward,” Lopez mentioned.
The airport defined that whereas this 12 months’s Memorial Day journey appears low, it is truly a rise from what they’ve seen up to now two years.
January 2022 noticed a dramatic enhance of 81.50% over January 2021, and February of this 12 months adopted swimsuit with a fair larger enhance in passenger visitors of 85.95%.
The airport remains to be working to get its numbers again to what it noticed in 2019, with 1.three million passengers.
“We’ll be again in that state rapidly and we’re excited to welcome individuals again to the airport,” Crafton mentioned.
The airport asks individuals to recollect to be affected person for summer time journey and to all the time arrive on the airport early for any flight.
