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Hate crowds? Here’s when to avoid business trips

October 31, 2017

Business travel surges the week before Thanksgiving. (Photo: Mineta San Jose Airport)

You’d think that as the Thanksgiving holidays approach, business travel would slow down. And during Thanksgiving week it does. But the week before Thanksgiving, you’ll see the year’s biggest crowds of business travelers, according to a new report.

Concur, a company that specializes in tracking business travelers’ expenses, did a day-by-day analysis of business travel volume over the course of a full year, and found that the Wednesday and Thursday of the week before Thanksgiving were the busiest days of the year for business travelers. (This year, that’s November 15 and 16.)

Of course, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the Sunday after are some the busiest days overall, but most of that traffic is from leisure travelers.

But there’s significant surge among business travelers that week before: The company said the number of business travelers on the road during those days is 58 percent higher than on the average weekday. Also, the bulk of travelers during those two busiest days are infrequent business travelers, Concur said, who take only one to three business trips a year.

Weekly levels of business travel; the red line is average. (Image: Concur)

The level of business trips drops below average during Thanksgiving week and the following week, the study found, and the lowest volumes of the entire year came during the last two weeks of December and the first week of January. (The number of business trips during the week between Christmas and New Year’s was 86 percent below the average week.)

By contrast, the weeks with the highest above-average levels of business trips came from early September through early November. Looking at full months rather than weeks, July was the slowest month for company trips, while October and November were the busiest.

July is the slowest month. (Image: Concur)

And where are road warriors going during their busy season? During the busiest travel dates, Concur said, the busiest domestic air travel routes, in order, are Chicago-New York, New York-Los Angeles, Dallas-Chicago, New York-San Francisco and Boston-New York. The busiest international routes are New York-London, San Francisco-London, Toronto-New York, Toronto-Chicago and Boston-London.

Concur offers these additional tips for business travel:

The earlier in November you travel, the better. So start planning your pre-holiday travel now.
If meetings and clients allow, shift your travel days to Mondays, Tuesdays or Fridays.
Consider alternate local airports beyond the traditional major hubs.
Avoid costly last-minute fares by booking between eight to 14 days in advance. After that, prices tend to jump 44%.

Where will YOU be this Thanksgiving? Which days will you avoid? Please leave your comments below.

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The busiest air routes you’ll probably never fly

September 13, 2017

Korea’s Jeju Island is a tourist hot spot. (Image: Visit Korea)

Have you ever been to Jeju Island? Probably not, unless you’re Korean. But travelers who go there are flying the world’s busiest air route.

Jeju is off the southern tip of the Korean peninsula; it’s got lots of beach resorts, a dormant volcano and a miles-long natural cave. It’s a favorite vacation spot for Koreans who want to get away from the hustle and bustle of the capital city, and in July 2017, almost 1.3 million persons flew between Jeju and Seoul (not Seoul Incheon, but Seoul Gimpo, nine miles west of the city).

A new study by Routesonline.com found that those passengers were accommodated on more than 5,800 flights between the two airports during July, or an average of 189 flights a day.

The study determined the world’s busiest air routes in terms of passenger numbers, and of the top 20, exactly none were in North America, Europe or South America. Almost all of them were in the Asia-Pacific region, mostly on domestic routes.

Chart: Routesonline.com

Ranking a distant second behind Seoul-Jeju was a domestic Japanese route, Tokyo Haneda to Sapporo New Chitose. (You might remember Sapporo, on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, as the site of the 1972 Winter Olympics – or as the name of a popular Japanese beer.)

The third-busiest route worldwide during July was one more likely to see Western travelers: Melbourne to Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport.

Rounding out the top 10 routes in passenger numbers were Tokyo Haneda-Fukuoka in Japan; Delhi-Mumbai in India; Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)-Hanoi in Vietnam; Shanghai Hongqiao-Beijing in China; Hong Kong-Taipei; Okinawa-Tokyo Haneda; and an Indonesian route, Jakarta-Surabaya.

What are the busiest routes in the US? We could not find a study that showed just July numbers like the one above, but World Atlas provides this list of the USA’s busiest over the full year from Aug 2014-Aug 2015– in millions of passengers. It’s probably not changed much since then.

Top 10 busiest air routes (in millions of passengers) in the US Aug 2014-Aug 2015 (Source: World Atlas)

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Best/worst days, airports & airlines for Thanksgiving

November 4, 2016

Carving out some time for Thanksgiving travel this year? I’m not! (Photo: Chris McGinnis)

The crazy Thanksgiving peak travel week is almost upon us; it can be a great time for reuniting with family and friends back home, but it can also be a time of travel trauma when you’re actually trying to get there.

Overall, travelers, the airlines and airports seem to have gotten the Thanksgiving travel drill down in recent years. When everyone plays by the rules and the weather cooperates, everything goes pretty smoothly and there’s a collective sigh of relief and a “well that was not so bad after all” when it’s all over. Hopefully that will happen again this year.

Did you think Thanksgiving travel was crowded and hectic last year? Well, in 2016, according to the airline trade organization Airlines for America (A4A), you can expect to see 55,000 more passengers per day than you did during last year’s Thanksgiving holiday period. “Highly affordable air fare is driving that increase,” A4A said. Airlines have bumped up capacity to handle the extra loads.

U.S. airlines expect to carry an average of 2.27 million passengers a day during the Thanksgiving period, which A4A defines as the 12 days from Friday, November 18 through Tuesday, November 29. Thanksgiving is Thursday, November 24. The group said it expects the busiest travel days to be – in descending order – Sunday the 27^th, Monday the 28^th, and Wednesday the 23^rd, with the lightest travel, as usual, on Thanksgiving Day itself.

But the travel search engine Skyscanner looked at its data and came to a different conclusion: It predicts the busiest day for air travel will be Saturday, November 19, “with travelers taking advantage of the short workweek to get away for a longer period of time,” said Randi Wolfson, the company’s communications chief for the Americas.

And where will it be the busiest on that day? Skyscanner predicts that passenger traffic will hit levels three times or more above average at New York LaGuardia; Washington Reagan National; and Orange County, California’s John Wayne Airport. Traffic is expected to be twice the usual level or more at both Chicago airports, all three Bay Area airports, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, New York JFK, Newark, Philadelphia, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Los Angeles International and Burbank.

Chart: Milecards.com

Another take on holiday travel trauma comes from Milecards.com, which conducted a study of airline cancellation rates over the holidays during the past six years at the nation’s 50 busiest airports.

Its main conclusion? “If you have only one holiday to choose for a flight home, make it Thanksgiving” instead of Christmas, Milecards said. Why? Because the flight cancellation rate around the late December holidays is five times greater than at Thanksgiving – 2.1 percent of all flights vs. 0.4 percent. The days when your flight is most likely to be canceled are December 26 and 27, the company said, while the best odds for avoiding a cancellation are on December 23 and 24.

With a hub at New York’s JFK, which has been hit by snowstorms during recent holidays, JetBlue takes a hit. Chart: Milecards.com

The worst holiday-period cancellation rate is at Newark Liberty International – almost three times the national average, and it’s worse around Christmas than Thanksgiving, with a cancellation rate of almost 6 percent. Airports with the lowest cancellation rates around the holidays are Honolulu, Oakland and Seattle, while the lowest rates for major connecting hubs are at Salt Lake City and Denver.

Milescards found that cancellation rates are much higher for shorter flights, such as San Francisco-Sacramento, than for longer flights such as transcons.

You can see several charts here documenting the findings of Milecards.com’s holiday flight cancellation study.

I’m staying put in San Francisco for Thanksgiving this year, with our feast just a short drive away. What about you? Will you brave the skies this year?

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