MW People were booking their Thanksgiving flights at a fast clip. Here's why that ended.

By Claudia Assis

Slower bookings will likely hurt U.S. airlines' bottom lines

New York City's LaGuardia Airport during Thanksgiving week last year. U.S. airlines likely will see an impact from slower bookings this year.

Fewer people have booked their Thanksgiving flights as compared with last year, a flip from earlier trends that had the U.S. airline industry hopeful about its holiday quarter.

Blame for the slowdown has gone to the federal government shutdown and related flight cancellations, which likely spooked many potential air travelers. U.S. airlines will see a financial impact from those slower bookings in their fourth quarter, which usually ties with second quarter and the start of the summer as their strongest in terms of sales.

"We see bookings reflecting a pivot in plans as consumers looked to solidify holiday travel plans during the government shutdown," said CFRA analyst Ana Garcia. "We are now expecting fourth quarter to come in softer due to the lag in bookings that could take time to recover, perhaps bleeding into early 2026."

Unfortunately for airlines, higher jet-fuel prices are also a potential headwind for the fourth quarter, as price projections have come in at about 3% higher, compared with a previous outlook of down about 2%, Garcia said.

Thanksgiving air-travel bookings are down 3.3% compared with last year's bookings for the same period, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics company. Those numbers take into consideration bookings for the Wednesday before the holiday through the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Before the government shutdown, bookings for the period were up by as much as 2% over last year, Cirium said. A "meaningful" year-over-year decline started around Oct. 31, when the shutdown was on its way to becoming the longest in history, with the steepest drop happening between Nov. 7 and Nov. 14, Cirium said.

The Trump administration, citing safety concerns, announced mandatory fight cuts at 40 of the nation's busiest airports on Nov. 5. The cuts kicked in Nov. 8, with the worst of the cancellations over that weekend. The shutdown ended last Wednesday.

Air-traffic controllers, classified as essential personnel, were expected to work through the funding impasse, with paychecks deferred until the end of the shutdown. Staffing shortages, however, had triggered flight delays and cancellations even before the flight cuts took effect.

For airline stocks, the shutdown introduced fourth-quarter earnings risk, which Delta Air Lines Inc. $(DAL)$ Chief Executive Ed Bastian mentioned in interviews last week.

The impact, however, is likely "temporary and not indicative of underlying demand," analysts at BofA Securities said in a recent note.

Airlines cut domestic capacity to match demand in the second half of the year, and that is likely to continue in 2026.

The previous government shutdown in 2018-19 had "minimal earnings impact to airlines, but this time is different given a stressed air-traffic-control system and mandated flight reductions," the BofA analysts said.

They estimated potential financial impact of around $150 million to $200 million for the major airlines. The actual impact, however, could be "meaningfully less," since airlines were able to rebook passengers and strategically plan cancellations, the BofA analysts noted.

Travel and leisure group AAA estimated earlier this week that 6 million people in the U.S. are expected to take domestic flights over the Thanksgiving holiday period, which would be a 2% increase compared to 2024.

"That figure could end up being slightly lower as some air travelers make other plans following recent flight cancellations," AAA cautioned.

The number of Thanksgiving air travelers over the past several years - with the exception of 2020 and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic - has hovered between 5 million and 6 million people, according to AAA.

Travel by other modes is expected to increase by 8.5% to nearly 2.5 million people, AAA said. That includes people traveling by bus, train and cruise. Buses and trains could see an uptick in last-minute bookings this year, AAA noted.

-Claudia Assis

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November 18, 2025 13:06 ET (18:06 GMT)

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