With nearly every travel oversight group predicting a record number of travelers, it only begs the question:
Just how bad is travel going to get this Thanksgiving and holiday season?
It’s a natural question.
One expert thinks it should be fine and certainly better than last year.'
Katy Nastro, a travel expert and spokesperson for Going.com, called it “the Super Bowl of travel seasons. … We’re expecting things to be busy and that can lead to a strain on the system.”
But with the unknown factor being the weather, she and her colleagues said that they are “cautiously optimistic.
“The software meltdown by Southwest was a Black Swan event,” she said. “It would be highly unlikely to see something like that occur again at the exact same time. I refrain from talking in absolutes, but if it happened again I would be absolutely shocked to see a similar event on such scale.”
Southwest Airlines had a technological breakdown at Christmas last year that caused tens of thousands of passengers to be delayed or canceled. CEO Bob Jordan said the airline has upgraded much of its software since last year.
“It would be in their best interest to get people where they need to be from an operational standpoint,” Nastro said. “Especially from a consumer confidence standpoint. … But Southwest has, I don’t want to call it retention, but they have great brand loyalty.”
Nastro also said the industry has gotten past the pent-up demand stage and is embarking on a new era.
“We’ve seen that play out in the last two years,” she said. “We’re way past the point of travel getting back to normal. We’re getting our first full view of what travel is going to be like moving forward, and not what it’s like coming out of the pandemic.”
As a result of more stabilization in the industry, she also felt that airfares would come down, and have been.
“It has definitely had its spike,” she said.
But timing is everything, she added.
“We’re less than a week away from Thanksgiving,” she said, “and weeks from the winter holidays. If you try to book something right now, then of course things are going to be expensive.”
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