Record air travel, dropping gas prices: How to get through one of the busiest holiday travel seasons

Travelers line up to go through an airport security checkpoint

By Ashley AhnStaff Writer

Dec. 21, 2023 Updated 2:34 PM PT

Christian Choe is done with the “headache-filled” challenges of holiday flying.

He missed Christmas with his family in Los Angeles last year because his Southwest Airlines flight from San Jose got canceled. It was one of nearly 17,000 flights that were canceled or delayed during the holidays last year in what the U.S. Department of Transportation called an “operational meltdown.”

The 28-year-old Stanford University graduate student said he’s not going to make that same mistake again.

“Maybe it won’t happen this year, but I didn’t want to deal with flights and any potential cancellations, so I figured that driving was much more reliable and simple,” he said.

He might just have the right game plan.

Airports across the country are expected to be the busiest they have ever been during the Christmas and New Year’s period since the American Automobile Assn. began tracking holiday travel in 2000. The Los Angeles International Airport has reported an increase in traffic of 3% to 4% this year over last year and is expecting more than 1.9 million fliers passing through security checkpoints from Dec. 15 to Jan. 2, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

Car travel is also expected to be the second highest on record after 2019, with nearly 104 million motorists nationwide driving to their holiday destinations. But the increased car travel comes at a time when gas prices are trending downward both in California and nationwide, alleviating some financial pressure for drivers.

Whether you’re hitting the road or taking flight, here’s what you need to know as the busiest days of the holiday travel season approaches.

Airports will be extra busy

TSA projected the busiest days of holiday travel at LAX and nationally would be Dec. 21 and Dec. 22 as well as Dec. 28 and Dec. 29.

Thomas Kowal, 25, has a flight to catch out of LAX on Friday and is determined not to miss it. The flight departs around 6 a.m. and he is planning to take an Uber from his apartment near the UCLA campus at 3:30 a.m. to get to the airport at least two hours early.

This is not his first rodeo, having taken similar 6 a.m. flights out of LAX to visit his family in Hadley, Mass. for four years. His main concern is long security lines like he saw during the Thanksgiving rush this year.

“For Thanksgiving, I got there just before the [security] line got out the door,” he said. “Hopefully I’ll beat [the crowd] and won’t have to wait in security for forever.”

LAX has been preparing for the holiday travel rush for the past several months, TSA Federal Security Director at LAX Jason Pantages said in a Dec. 14 statement.

“Travelers can expect to see checkpoints staffed and lanes open,” Pantages said. “We encourage the traveling public to take a few minutes and prepare for the security screening process to help keep our operations efficient and smooth.”

Airline workers plan to take advantage of the holiday rush to stage rallies at the airport this December, calling for more pay. United Airlines flight attendants picketed last week, followed by Alaska Airlines flight attendants on Tuesday. As tens of thousands of passengers shuffled their way through the airport Wednesday, LAX passenger services workers also held a rally in Terminals 1 and 2, demanding that the L.A. City Council support a law that would boost their pay.

Kyle Potter, executive editor of Thrifty Traveler, said the record numbers for this holiday season is part of air travel’s climb back to pre-pandemic levels. During the early months of the pandemic, cities locked down around the world, bringing the airline industry to the brink of collapse. But now, American air travel continues to surge at a record pace and surpass pre-pandemic levels.

“This is really the first full year, 2023, where it has felt like air travel was back to normal or close to it,” he said.

Potter, who specializes in helping people find cheap flights, said it is too late to find airline ticket bargains but, if time and logistics allow, he suggests turning to car travel for a “fixed and predictable cost.”

Motorists will save on gas

Gas prices in California have dropped about $1.50 a gallon since late September’s surge to an average of $4.58 as of Thursday.

Following a record-high price of $6.44 a gallon in June 2022, California gas prices have fluctuated but failed to dip below $4 a gallon, a figure commonly seen before 2021. Experts attribute the recent drop in gas prices to the seasonal decline typically seen during the fall and winter months when demand for gas falls off, and a natural recovery from the most recent price spike in September amid refinery issues.

“This is the recovery and we’re continuing to see lower prices recovering from that extreme spike,” Marie Montgomery, an Automobile Club of Southern California spokesperson, said. “And since we’re now in the time of the year where gasoline demand is typically at the lowest point, it is continuing to drop.”

Crude oil prices tend to drop nearly 30% from late September into early winter, according to AAA. And in California, the transition from summer reformulated gasoline, which can add 15 to 20 cents to gas prices, to winter blend gasoline helps drive gas prices down at the end of the year, said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at Gas Buddy.

Gas stations in California must sell the pricier reformulated gasoline, blended to burn more cleanly and reduce toxic pollutants, from April to the end of October. But when gas prices soared in summer 2022 due to a variety of factors including inflation and the war in Ukraine, Gov. Gavin Newsom allowed winter blend gasoline to be sold about a month earlier to alleviate gas prices.

The same happened this year, Montgomery said.

“They just lifted that requirement so that there could be enough gasoline supply to drive down the price,” she said.

Despite the downtrending gas prices, California’s average gas price remains 23 cents more than last year and $1.46 above the national average as of Thursday. De Haan said this is because California is still reeling from refinery issues in late September. The good news is that the state will most likely continue to see a decline in gas prices even as prices begin to creep back up nationwide, he said.

But if you’re driving in the Los Angeles area this holiday, try to avoid the 5 Freeway. AAA anticipates L.A. to see peak congestion on the 5 southbound heading into Los Angeles from the Bakersfield area on Dec. 27 around 6:15 p.m., with travel times about 50% longer.

The falling gas prices are convenient for Choe, but he said he would have made the decision to drive regardless of the gas prices just to avoid air travel. With a six-and-a-half-hour drive ahead of him, he anticipates smooth sailing on Christmas Day.

“There isn’t much traffic driving down to L.A. on Christmas Day, so it should be a pretty smooth trip,” he said.