Holiday Travel Expected to Break Records as Delays and Cancellations Ease

<div class="block">As the July 4th weekend gets underway, holiday travel is expected to break records. Cheddar News senior reporter Michelle Castillo found that despite the anticipated headaches, airports are a lot more calm and decongested than anticipated.</div>

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And we know weather has been affecting travel this week. Airline delays, cancellations have inconvenienced thousands of travelers, but it seems like things may be clearing up for the Fourth of July holiday weekend. Here's hoping for the latest. Our senior reporter Michelle Castillo joins us from laguardia Airport in my hometown of Queens, New York. Michelle. What's happening in laguardia right now? Not too much traffic behind you. No, you know what? It's not as crowded as a lot of people were expecting. I just checked the T A. It's about 10 minutes to go through, which is about standard for security here at laguardia at this time. And it's a little different from what we were hearing with the reports. The one thing that travelers did say though is they did pay a little more than they were expecting when they were buying ticket prices. And of course, when you buy food and concessions, everything is a little bit increased that thanks to inflation, but as for travel, it's not as crazy. Now, if you just look over to the ticket booth behind me, you are probably going to notice that there's more suitcases that you typically would have seen, we saw much larger suitcases this morning as well. I think that's more of the nature of it being a four day weekend. Typically. If you think about a July 3 is just a three day. So people are definitely taking advantage of the fact they have a little bit more time to travel and that gas prices have gone down. So there are definitely more people not here at laguardia but other airports I know that are being impacted heavily are expected to be Atlanta, Washington DC, Houston and Denver. So how are travelers responding? How are they feeling? Are they anxious at all about traveling over the weekend? You know, I talked to quite a few people this morning and the one thing they realized is, hey, it's not as bad as I was expecting. One big trend we're noticing is that people are trying to minimize the stuff they're bringing. A lot of people are saying, hey, if I could bring a carry on, that's going to save me my $40 or so, check in fee. But definitely with that four days, it's a little hard for some people, especially with families to just go with a typical carry on. So definitely trying to get around that, but most people are really happy that it is not as bad. It didn't take them that long to get the airport here. Things are moving as quickly as possible. The T did point out that s a precheck has helped a lot of that really just sorting out security lines. So and this is the international area as well. Not as many international flights from this terminal this morning for some reason, but definitely flight delays that people were worried about are happening. But for the most part, it wasn't everyone saying not as bad as they were expecting. How does travel this July 4th weekend compared to previous years? Are we seeing more traffic a little bit less? Maybe. Well, according to AAA, they were expecting 50.7 million Americans to travel more than 50 miles this Fourth of July weekend. That's definitely up double digits from 2022 and it's up from pre pandemic levels in terms of air traffic traffic since I'm here at the airport, 4.17 million travelers expected to hit the skies this holiday weekend. That's again up double digits from 2022 and also up about 6.6% from pre pandemic. 2019.