Record Number of Travelers Expected Over Thanksgiving Week

Bad weather threatens roads over the holiday, but airports have had little trouble on Wednesday.

Marvin Scott usually gets to the airport about 45 minutes before his flights, but on Wednesday, he arrived at Kennedy International Airport in New York two hours early, aware that experts had warned that this Thanksgiving travel week would be the busiest ever.

He was pleasantly surprised to find a calm scene as he walked toward the gates for his flight to Puerto Rico. “Now I’ve got to figure out what to do,” he said.

Whether people are moving by rail, road or air, the days around Thanksgiving are among the busiest travel days of the year in the United States, and this year is expected to break records.

The Transportation Security Administration said it expected to screen 18.3 million travelers from Tuesday through Monday — about 6 percent more than in 2023. AAA, the automobile organization, expects a record number of travelers, including nearly 72 million motorists.

Weather challenges across the United States threatened to disrupt those travel plans. The Midwest was expecting a wind chill, while the South and Northeast were expecting a cold, rainy storm system. Snow was also possible in parts of the Northeast.

Forecasters on Wednesday issued winter storm warnings for parts of Colorado and Utah, saying that heavy snow there could make travel difficult or impossible. More than 500 flights were delayed at Denver International Airport as snow moved over the area on Wednesday, according to FlightAware.

Lake-effect snow is expected along the eastern Great Lakes on Thursday and Friday. Travel disruptions are likely, especially on Interstate 90 between Cleveland and Buffalo and on Interstate 81 north of Syracuse, N.Y., forecasters warned.

The T.S.A. “is well prepared for this holiday,” R. Carter Langston, a spokesman for the agency, said on Tuesday. Wednesday and Sunday are expected to be the busiest days for air travel, with about 3 million travelers expected on each of those days. But even at many of the busiest airports across the country, including major airports in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas and Denver, wait times at security checkpoints were below 15 minutes for most of the day on Wednesday.

The Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday that some flights arriving at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey were delayed by an average of one hour and 35 minutes because of staffing issues.

Aside from those problems, air travel was relatively uneventful on Wednesday. At Kennedy Airport, travelers leisurely rolled their suitcases through a nearly empty Terminal 8. Lines at the check-in counters were nearly nonexistent, with only a few groups of travelers spread out among the kiosks.

Jhnelle Grand, 19, began her volunteer shift at the Terminal 8 information desk at 10 a.m. A few people stopped to ask logistical questions about the check-in process, but it was a much quieter morning than she expected.

“It made me forget that Thanksgiving is tomorrow,” she said.

Elizabeth Gordon and her partner arrived at Kennedy Airport three hours early for a 7:15 p.m. flight to Salt Lake City and were struck by how calm things were at Terminal 4 — and how safe they had played it in anticipation of the travel rush.

“He suburban dad-ed us, because we thought the lines were going to be significantly worse than they are,” Ms. Gordon, 29, said of her partner, who kept tabs on T.S.A. security line wait time estimates throughout the day.

Some of the unexpected calm could be attributed to the fact that more people were expected to travel on the Tuesday before and the Monday after Thanksgiving than in past years, in part because of flexible work patterns that took hold at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Remote work has changed things so that a lot of people can work remotely from their destination,” said Aixa Diaz, a spokeswoman for AAA, which also analyzes air travel. She noted that domestic travel was expected to exceed prepandemic levels.

Marilyn Lizardo, who was traveling with her family to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic, had prepared for major congestion and was surprised to arrive at Kennedy Airport on Wednesday to a scene that she described as “mellow.”

She had wanted to get her eyebrows threaded before the trip, she said, but skipped it out of fear that she and her family would encounter long lines and miss their flight.

“God forbid it was my fault,” she said, laughing.

Judson Jones and Amanda Holpuch contributed reporting.