With the candy eaten and the costume photos emoji’d on Facebook, our cultural attention now turns to the holidays, and, more specifically, to all that dreaded holiday travel. After all, the holidays are the busiest travel season of the year and always a total nightmare, right? Not necessarily. Here are some travel myths people follow that you’ll give thanks to ignore.
You Should Fly On The Tuesday Before Thanksgiving
One of the most commonly held myths is that there’s a specific day you should be getting into the air. It tends to flip-flop between the Tuesday or Wednesday before Thaksgiving (depending on who you ask), but the basic idea is that if you avoid the “busiest travel day of the year,” you’ll have a much better turkey day. Except, well, Thanksgiving doesn’t even come close to being the hardest time to travel.
The busiest travel days of the year are usually summer weekends, and the holidays usually don’t even break the top five busiest days, not least because the vast majority of America is getting behind the wheel, not a tray table, to get to their Thanksgiving festivities. That said, Thanksgiving is busier than usual, even more so than Christmas! Not everybody has a tree, but everybody loves having a turkey leg with their relatives.
Let’s be honest, here, though: The entire holiday week will see crowded airports, screaming children, and burned out travelers, so choose a flight based on what works for your schedule, not some mythical idea of the perfect travel day, and you’ll be much less stressed in the end.
There Are More Delays On Thanksgiving
Allegedly, Thanksgiving sees more delays than any other time of the year, but the numbers don’t lie: Last year, the Thanksgiving holiday saw 15% of flights delayed and less than one percent of flights canceled in the US. That’s two percentage points below
the yearly average. Yep, that means you have a better chance of making your flight on “one of the worst travel days of the year” than you do on a random weekday.
It makes sense, if you stop and think about it. Everybody knows the holidays are a heavy travel period, including the airlines, who would logically want to bring their A game. That said, some things are out of even the airlines’ control, and Thanksgiving falling in late November means potential weather delays, like 2013’s cancellation mess. The only difference, though, between Thanksgiving 2013 and, say, February 2003’s delay cascade, was that more people were there to see it.
The TSA Will Unwrap Your Presents And Take Your Food
It should tell you how sick the TSA is of this particular myth that they have a whole blog post about how, no, they probably aren’t going to unwrap your presents. That said, they do reserve the right to open wrapped packages if they set off an alarm or trigger a sensor, so consider leaving metal objects, electronics, perfumes, and the like unwrapped, and look at what needs to be checked as opposed to carried on.
The good news? You can, in fact, bring home whole cakes and pies as long as you let TSA inspect your baked goods. Just don’t hide a file in them!
You Can Never, Ever, Ever Get A Good Deal On Airfare If You Don’t Plan Ahead
Like any good urban legend, there’s a tiny kernel of truth at the core of this one. The earlier you book your ticket, generally speaking, the better off you are financially. And getting a flight last-minute can be a costly proposition and a logistical nightmare on busy days. But provided you’ve got a little flexibility on timing and aren’t choosy about the airport you fly to — as long as it’s in the general vicinity of your destination — you’re no more likely to be stranded at the airport on the holidays than any other time of year.
So Why Is Holiday Travel Really So Terrible?
The reason holiday travel can feel so awful and overwhelming is that we’re never really ready for it (even if we do it every year). Statistics are one thing, but being told your flight probably won’t get canceled is cold comfort when it happens anyway. And even though there’s no way that holiday travel will ever be pleasant, here are some helpful ways in which you can make your trip much more bearable:
- Try to book your flight as early as you can. The sooner you can get it locked in, the saner you’ll be.
- The two-hour guideline for arrival is useful even if you zip through the security line. You won’t have to deal with issues at the airport at the last minute.
- Familiarize yourself with the TSA’s guidelines for what can and can’t be carried on, and your airline’s carry-on size requirements.
- Wear shoes you can easily slip off, like loafers, for the security line.
- Cut down on your luggage to just the stuff you’ll need with you if your flight gets canceled; if possible, ship everything else ahead.
- Keep a day’s worth of toiletries and sanitary items and a change of underwear and undershirt in your carry-on. If your delay stretches out, or you’re stuck somewhere without your luggage, you can at least not feel gross.
- Bring a fully charged power bank for your phone and tablet, or even better, go old-school and bring a paperback or two.
And above all, be kind, no matter how frustrating it can get. After all, everybody else is on the same plane you are.
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