The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is expecting the year to end on a strong note, as travelers flock to the airport during the Christmas and New Year's holidays despite a rash of flight cancellations and the fast-spreading omicron variant of the coronavirus.
The number of travelers clearing security checkpoints at MSP will nearly double on peak days when compared with last year's levels, according to the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC), which owns and operates the airport.
About 6 million people nationwide will fly to their holiday destinations, a 184% increase over last year's airline bookings, according to AAA. Weary of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts say people yearn to travel this holiday season to see family and friends.
"I'm not worried about COVID or crowds," said Chaly Yang of St. Paul, who was heading to Seattle and then California to visit family Friday morning. His biggest worry: mistakenly reading his travel itinerary and arriving four hours before his flight.
The busiest day at MSP during the holiday season will be Sunday, with about 35,000 passengers clearing Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoints, according to booking forecasts. A close second will be Monday.
By comparison, the same days last year saw more than 21,000 passengers clearing security, far below the daily pre-pandemic peaks that reached as high as 46,000 daily passengers, the MAC said in a news release.
While thousands of travelers globally received notice that their flights were canceled on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day due to a spike in omicron cases among airline employees, MSP didn't appear to be hard hit. By midday Friday, just 21 arriving and departing flights at MSP had been canceled, and 30 flights delayed.
"It doesn't matter if it's one flight or 1,000 if it's your flight that's canceled," said Henry Harteveldt, travel industry analyst at San Francisco-based Atmosphere Research. "This is just the latest wrinkle we've seen added to the challenge of travel in the age of COVID. ... It's as if the Grinch took over the airline business right now."