What to expect if you’re traveling through the Philly airport this Thanksgiving, which may be its busiest since 2019

This year could be PHL’s busiest Thanksgiving for travel since 2019.

Between the start of the holiday period last Friday and the end next Tuesday, an estimated 905,000 travelers could come through Philadelphia International Airport, based on the number of seats available on flights on those days, the airport said.

That’s 11% higher than 2022 and 19% lower than in 2019, said Heather Redfern, the airport’s public affairs manager.

“The Thanksgiving 2023 travel period will be our busiest since 2019,” said Atif Saeed, CEO of the airport, in a statement. “The uptick in travel continues a trend we have experienced throughout this year and makes us excited for our continued pandemic recovery as we head into 2024.”

Expectations from airport officials about a busy holiday time are in line with research conducted by a team at Villanova University, led by Chenfeng Xiong, assistant professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering.

“We want to ask ourselves, are we at the end of the pandemic? Are we back to normal daily life?,” Xiong said about questions his team was asking as they examined their data.

Xiong said the airport could see around 95% of the holiday travel it saw in 2019 during the same time.

His team has been studying how human mobility influences the dynamics of diseases. Their research has produced some projections for what air travel could look like this week at PHL.

From 2019 through 2023, the team, which includes Ph.D. student Weiyu Luo, collected data from smartphone location-based services, social media, GPS, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth hot spots using AI-driven data mining.

Other data that they used but did not need to mine includes information from the Census, the National Household Travel Survey, and local regional household travel surveys in the Philadelphia metropolitan area.

Using data from the six days before Thanksgiving through five days after the holiday, the team mapped out travel patterns from 2019 through 2022 for PHL travelers. Then, with that same data pool, they created an AI model that produced estimates and projections for 2023.

In 2022, during the 12 days examined, an estimated 867,000 travelers came through PHL, according to Xiong’s research. This year, that number is expected to rise to nearly 1,000,000, which is about 95% of traffic in 2019 and about 100,000 over what the airport has said it anticipates.

The increase this year could be because more travelers are comfortable flying who might not have been since the COVID-19 pandemic, or that “the availability of travel options are increasing and many international flights are gradually being added to our available choices,” said Xiong.

The days that travelers are choosing to fly during the Thanksgiving holiday period have also changed since 2019, according to Xiong’s research. While the busiest travel day in 2019 was estimated to be on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, this year the busiest time is expected to be the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

That’s in line with a trend since 2021, where Wednesday has become the slightly busier day for travel than Sunday, according to the model.

The Sunday after Thanksgiving is not expected to see as many travelers as in 2019. Xiong said that could be in part because of remote work options, which allows travelers to spread out their return over a longer period of time. Still, this year’s Sunday travel after Thanksgiving is expected to be higher than in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

And PHL expects that day to be its busiest Thanksgiving travel day this year, with 92,474 passengers arriving and departing. The second busiest day is expected on the day before Thanksgiving, according to airport officials.