Labor Day Holiday Gains Back 90 Percent of Air Travel Compared to 2019

The final numbers are in, and they are encouraging.

Despite a late Labor Day this year, the five-day holiday weekend from September 2 through September 6 saw 9,229,145 fliers take to the air, according to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

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That’s just less than a million people off from the 10,202,656 passengers who flew during Labor Day weekend of 2019.

Surprise, surprise! Labor Day travel activity - which was anticipated to decrease due to fear of the Delta variant - surged past last year's levels, at least in the first three days of the holiday weekend. The 3% increase translates to 43.7 million Americans hitting the road for the holiday weekend.

In fact, just as experts predicted this Labor Day would have far less travelers, even road trips were up. Early results from Arrivalist's Daily Travel Index indicate that there were 3 percent more road trips of 50 miles or more initiated on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday leading into Labor Day weekend of 2021. From 2019 to 2020, travel on those same dates fell by 5.5 percent

"What’s surprising is that road trip activity is increasing despite growing case counts," Arrivalist Founder Cree Lawson said in a statement. "This time last year, case counts were falling and you still saw a drop in road trips. We see this as an indicator of the resilience of travel - at least by travel car - despite an ever-evolving pandemic conditions.”

And at a moment in time when air travel is generally considered to be back to about 70-75 percent of what it was two years ago because of the pandemic – and at a time when the delta variant of the coronavirus is still causing a rapid rise in COVID-19 cases – this year’s figures show that airlines drew 90 percent of the capacity they had two years ago for the same holiday.

Labor Day weekend in 2019 ran from August 29 to September 2.

It’s an encouraging sign for the airlines, to be sure. Labor Day weekend air travel in 2021 held its own against Labor Day 2019; did the same when compared to the Fourth of July holiday earlier this year with 90 percent capacity; and blew away Memorial Day weekend, which had 7.1 million people screened.

Labor Day weekend is the unofficial end of summer, with temperatures starting to fall a bit and kids either back in school or heading back this coming week. For those reasons alone travel usually gets a boost as a sort of last hurrah.

But air travel saw a noticeable dip in numbers starting in mid-August over public fears that the coronavirus was as prevalent as it was last year.

With business travel still down significantly, airlines are hoping the pent-up demand for leisure travel continues into the fall. To that end, they have begun to cut fares as an enticement to lure more travelers.