West Michigan's Morning News
What is the Busiest Travel Day?
And this is West Michigan's Morning News. We went around the room a while ago guessing the busiest travel day, none of us guessed. Tomorrow, Rory O'Neill NBC News Radio National Correspondent on the Liveline. Rory, thanks for doing this today. Yeah, good morning, busiest travel day ever for the TSA, ever. Tomorrow. What? What are we missing? Why tomorrow? Okay, pick up it this way. You take a week's vacation, right? Five days. Thursday, Friday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and next week, next Thursday, Friday, the boss is probably giving you those two days off. Oh, Fourth of July. All right, so now you get this extended little trip. A lot of Americans are hopping on long distance flights and going to Europe. Americans are invading Europe. Spain, Greece, and Italy are some of the top destinations. And that's before we get to the Olympics happening in Paris. And there's the Taylor Swift effect. A lot of Americans flying to the UK just to see Taylor. Is this affordability? Like I was still checking flights and it seems it's cheaper to go overseas, which is wild than even the West Coast from where we are in Michigan. Yeah, well, the airlines have really ramped up the number of flights and the size of the planes as well. So capacity now exceeds pre-pandemic levels. And one of our colleagues who works at a radio station in Miami, he's recently back from going to Cardiff in Wales. He took the family to Cardiff because it was cheaper to see Taylor Swift there and to try to buy scalped tickets in Miami. Wow. The trip overseas was cheaper than seeing her locally. In his hometown? Yep. That's crazy. I mean, he probably doesn't, well, I guess you pay your housing deposit, but no rent. Are there any other thoughts about this too, Roy, and the fact of maybe just people want to get away inflation. So this is their one big trip. Like you said, because of the way the holiday falls. I mean, are there any other factors that you see playing out here? I think we're seeing the second big trip. I think we're seeing people that, you know, we're doing revenge travel after the pandemic. They got their bucket trip two or three years ago. And we're like, hey, this is pretty good. Let's try to do this again. And now they're trying to check off more of future destinations for themselves and going into different locations. We've got 53,677 scheduled flights tomorrow. Oh my gosh. That's awesome. Hi for the FPA 53,677. So pray for good weather. And Roy, can the TSA handle this? Well, you know, when we talk about these records, they're pretty incremental. Like it's a, it was 200 and two, two million nine hundred and ninety six thousand four hundred and ninety five. That's the number one spot. And the number two spot is just 11,000 behind. So we're talking a degree of 10, 15, 20,000 separate each of the top five spots. So it will, you know, the TSA says they're ready. They're urging passengers though. Check your bag first. Like open the bag to make sure it doesn't have a pocket knife or for God's sakes, a gun in it. You know, take those things out. Make sure you don't discover at the TSA scanner that whoops. Yeah, I've got the bowie knife in the bottom of my bag and get there good and early. If the crowds are going to be big, Rory O'Neill NBC News Radio National correspondent. Great stuff. Thank you. Thanks, guys.