The Thanksgiving travel rush is in full swing, with passengers on planes and trains expected to return to near pre-pandemic levels. AAA projects roughly 1.5 million New Jersey residents will travel 50 miles or more over the holiday weekend, about a 2% increase over last year. What wasn’t back to normal were the prices at the pump. Robert Sinclair Jr., senior manager of public affairs for AAA Northeast, says driving remains the most popular form of travel, it also a pricey one.
Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst with Atmosphere Research Group, estimated that airfares are also up about 45%. “That’s a huge increase,” he said. “But I think a big reason why people are traveling — and this is something we show in our research — is that we are doing things now because we don’t know what we can do in the future. We don’t know when something will happen to once again restrict our ability to travel.”
