TRAVEL: Holiday travel slows sharply

Base-price tickets still available for some major destinations

By CHRIS BAGLEY - Staff Writer | Friday, November 21, 2008 3:08 PM PST ∞

A sharp downturn in the nation's economy is cutting into holiday travel, with airports in San Diego and Ontario expecting fewer Thanksgiving-week passengers than last year.

That amounts to a reversal after six years of small increases, prompting airlines to offer discounts rarely seen during the holidays.

The day before Thanksgiving is generally the busiest of the year for airlines. In most recent years, tickets have been sold out a couple of weeks in advance.

But flights to several East Coast destinations next Wednesday still were less than 90 percent booked as of Friday morning. Delta Airlines' only nonstop flight from San Diego to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport on Wednesday still had 32 of its 162 seats available as of Friday morning, according to Delta's online booking service. Thirty-two of 163 seats remained on one of Continental's six nonstops from San Diego to Houston.

Southwest Airlines still had open seats on several flights to Indianapolis on Friday for $99, its usual base rate. Seats on a Wednesday-morning flight were still available at $239, a relatively modest premium for eleventh-hour reservations on the busiest day of the year. American Airlines, Northwest and Delta are discounting one-way tickets on some routes to less than $60.

Most flights to West Coast destinations still had at least a small handful of tickets remaining, and major airlines were offering round-trip flights in the range of $250 to $350.

San Diego International Airport expects about 53,000 passengers a day next week, compared with 55,000 in 2007, a spokeswoman said.

Doug Schilling, a freelance computer repairman who lives in Bonsall, said his business has been too slow for him to be comfortable buying airline tickets for him and his wife Leslie to visit her parents near Sacramento.

Schilling was out of work from May to August due to slowing business at the print shop where he was employed. The couple has cut back on driving, going to movies and eating out. For a while, they were forced to pinch pennies on dinners at home, Leslie Schilling said.

"Lots of PB and J and nothing else," she said.

People who live in the counties of San Bernardino and Riverside appear to be pinching their pennies even more tightly. Ontario International Airport, the two-county area's largest, expects about 147,000 passengers from Friday through Nov. 30, down from 210,000 in the same 10 days of 2007.

The airport attributed the sharp drop mostly to cessation of service by ExpressJet and JetBlue. Both cited high fuel prices earlier this year in their decisions to pull out of Ontario. The two-county area's economy has imploded more dramatically than nearly any other region in California, with unemployment above 9 percent since July.

The Auto Club of Southern California forecasts airline travel to be off by about 5.5 percent this Thanksgiving, spokeswoman Marie Montgomery said. Most Amtrak trains had seats available, though at least one was already completely booked for Wednesday.

Thanksgiving-week travel had been rising by an average of 2 percent each year since the disruptions of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Montgomery said, but the Auto Club's recent survey of California residents found that 2.3 percent fewer Southern Californians plan to travel this year. The group's nationwide affiliate, AAA, issued similarly desolate forecasts for the nation as a whole.

Those gloomy results may not fully hold up if gasoline prices continue to slide next week, Montgomery said. Regular gas fell to an average $2.25 a gallon in North County on Thursday, down from $2.45 last week and a peak of $4.60 in June.

"Maybe people might make a last-minute decision to just go somewhere on the weekend," she said.

Contact staff writer Chris Bagley at (760) 740-5444 or cbagley@nctimes.com. Bagley blogs about local economic trends at http://bizblogs.nctimes.com.