COLUMBUS – The slowly improving economy could boost travel over the Thanksgiving holiday to levels not seen in Ohio in over a decade.
The auto club AAA forecasts that 48.7 million Americans will travel, the busiest Thanksgiving period on U.S. roads and skies since 2007, the year before the global financial crisis plunged the U.S. economy into a deep recession. The 1 million more Americans who will venture at least 50 miles from home represents a 1.9 percent increase over last year.
The club’s Ohio office says that will include more than 2 million Ohioans, an increase of 2.1 percent over last year and the largest number since 2005.
The forecast was assembled at research firm IHS, which said it considered jobs, household net worth, the stock market, prices for gasoline and airline tickets, and other factors.
The researchers did their number crunching in mid-October, about three weeks before the surprising outcome in the presidential election.
About 90 percent of those travelers in Ohio will be driving to their destination, a 2.4 percent increase over 2015, thanks to gas prices which have dipped below $2 a gallon for the first time in three months, according to AAA Ohio spokeswoman Kim Schwind.
While gas prices in many parts of the country are now in line with, or even above, year-ago levels, the $28 billion motorists have saved so far this year helped increase disposable income available for holiday travel, AAA president and CEO Marshall Doney said.
The relatively small number of travelers who will go by air — 3.7 million overall and more than 144,000 Ohioans — will be an average of $205 per round trip ticket, a 21 percent jump from last year.
Officials at John Glenn Columbus International Airport estimate that a total of nearly 90,000 passengers will travel through the airport on the weekend’s busiest travel days, Wednesday, Sunday and Monday.