Thanksgiving travel from Nashville: Preparation, flights, tickets, more for holiday
The best preparation for a holiday flight may be meditation, prayer or a tiring workout.
That's because your biggest setback is likely to be long hours of tedious and confounding delays.
Air travelers this holiday season can expect big crowds, full planes and routine schedule interruptions.
In a 12-month period ending in September, nearly one out of every three flights from Nashville International Airport arrived later than its scheduled time, a FlightTracker review of data found. In comparison, only 31% of scheduled flights nationwide were on time in 2022, according to the Department of Transporation.
Get ready to wait
Holiday surges put more pressure on an already-stressed system.
"My advice to travelers is to be prepared for delays and cancellations, get into the mindset that it might take a little longer to get to where you’re going," said Ganesh Sitaraman, a Vanderbilt University law professor and author of "Why Flying Is Miserable and How to Fix It."
There are remedies available for those who experience delays and cancellations, but they vary by airline and mostly apply to canceled flights. The Department of Transportation publishes a list of those airline policies on its website.
The DOT requires airlines to reimburse travelers whose flights are canceled, but not those who are delayed. The most common reimbursement for a delay is an airport food voucher, but some passengers can get a hotel voucher for overnight interruptions.
Sitaraman encourages frustrated travelers to make their voices heard by demanding improvements to the industry.
"Call your member of Congress and tell them to reform the airline industry to fix smaller seats, junk fees, and everything that makes air travel miserable," Sitaraman said. "Don’t take it out on the people who work at the airport. Be kind to them. They’re working hard to get you where you’re going."
Your dad's right: Arrive early
To help avoid interruptions, airport officials recommend that travelers:
Arrive early to provide extra time to park, navigate the changing campus and allow for security delays.
Check your flight status regularly.
Sign up for airport text alerts at Stay Informed: BNA Alerts Onboard (callfire-widgets-prod.s3.amazonaws.com).
Expect traffic at the airport, especially at the primary exit, 216-A on Interstate 40. Airport officials recommend using the 216-B and Murfreesboro Pike exits.
For those arriving to pick up passengers, use the cellphone lot at 1415 Murfreesboro Pike instead of circling the terminal.
Nashville International Airport has had record numbers of passengers this year, following a decade of rapid customer growth — except during the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel was nearly nonexistent.
The airport has expanded rapidly to accommodate growth and has new security lanes and amenities for travelers.
But airlines are still rebuilding their fleets after selling jets to cope with reduced travel in 2020.
"The U.S. is operating less aircraft now but moving pretty much the same passenger numbers as 2019 — especially on busy holidays," FlightTracker spokesperson Kathleen Bangs said. "Airlines are accomplishing this by using larger aircraft as many smaller regional airplanes are parked due to the pilot shortage felt most critically at the smaller carriers."
Airline networks are also highly susceptible to problems when there is inclement weather in their hub cities.
Since airlines were deregulated in 1978, they have built their networks around regional hubs — rather than spreading out operations across evenly distributed cities — that can act as a bottleneck to the system.
"The fact that the major airlines have shifted toward a hub-and-spoke model in which passengers have to connect through big airports rather than flying nonstop actually makes air travel less reliable," Sitaraman said. "If there's a major weather event in one of the big hubs, it cascades throughout the entire country, delaying and canceling flights."
Busiest days to fly
A record 40,000 people a day moved through Nashville International Airport during fall break in October.
Nashville airport officials said its busiest days over the Thanksgiving holiday will be Nov. 19, Nov. 22 and Nov. 26, with 35,000 people moving through BNA on each day.
Nashville airport officials said they have done what they can to prevent delays on campus, with expanded winter-weather equipment and security processing lanes. The airport invested in larger snowplows, brooms and has plans to update de-icing equipment and facilities. Snow and ice removal during two ice storms in December 2022 cost BNA $946,000.
The airlines are prepared, but pressure from larger-than-usual crowds can create more opportunities for problems.
Southwest Airlines — which runs more than half of all Nashville flights — has used winter-weather drills to troubleshoot emergency-response plans. The company also modernized its software systems to manage its complex calendar, among efforts to prevent a repeat of its systemwide failure in December 2022.
Tens of thousands of Southwest passengers nationwide were stranded during Christmas week last year. The meltdown affected more than 100,000 people trying to fly through Nashville on 554 canceled Southwest flights.
This year, Southwest COO Andrew Watterson said the company enacted a three-part plan to prepare. This includes modernizing systems, increasing emergency response training and operations, and expanding its crew bases beyond Denver and Chicago, including a Nashville base to open next year.
"We are now so much better prepared for these extreme weather events," Watterson said, at an earnings call in October. "The disruption we had last winter was really hard on our customers and our employees. So preparing to prevent something like that from happening again was and is an imperative."
Sandy Mazza can be reached via email at smazza@tennessean.com, by calling 615-726-5962, or on Twitter @SandyMazza.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Thanksgiving travel: Arrive early to airport, best days to fly