Thanksgiving Travel: Gravy Train for Agents

Despite the hullabaloo surrounding this coming New Year’s, tradition-bound and staid Thanksgiving is expected to grab a larger share of the travel market this holiday season.

Travel industry groups and local vacation planners say airline bookings for the annual turkey binge are perhaps the plumpest they’ve ever been. At the same time, plans to travel for the dawn of 2000 are looking thin.

“New Year’s is shaping up to be a bust,” said Steve Rockow of Airtours Cruises & Travel Services in Encino.

The main reasons for the trend, Rockow and other travel experts say, are perceived millennium price-gouging by hotels and cruise ships and concerns over possible computer failures triggered by the advent of 2000.

Thanksgiving is traditionally a hectic travel time, with the Wednesday before and the Sunday after among the busiest transit days of the year. But with its promise of a rare four-digit rollover, this New Year’s weekend had generated early expectations that hordes of people would travel the globe in search of the ideal spot to mark the momentous occasion.

But, with less than six weeks before the big event, it appears that many will be staying put.

“A lot of people that were thinking about traveling over the millennium . . . are staying home,” said Terry Trippler, who tracks the travel industry for OneTravel.com, an Internet-based consumer bulletin. Fatigue over the millennium hype has also contributed to sluggish travel bookings, he said. “I think people are just wiped out by all this.”

For its part, Christmas is expected to generate strong travel business, but industry observers say it probably won’t touch off the same frenzy in bookings as Thanksgiving. With Dec. 25 falling on a weekend this year, travelers have more leeway to tinker with their vacation schedules, and the holiday’s impact on the road and skies is expected to be spread out over several days.

So Thanksgiving, mounting evidence indicates, will steal the holiday travel spotlight.

With 18 million passengers filling planes to 89% capacity, last year’s Thanksgiving weekend was the most itinerant in recent memory. But passenger volume this year is expected to top that by at least 2% to set a record, said Diana Cronan, with the Air Transport Assn. in Washington.

Meanwhile, on the ground, a record number of U.S. travelers are expected to be on the road this Thanksgiving. A projected 33.8-million Americans plan to travel 100 miles or more during the holiday weekend, up 200,000 from last year, the American Automobile Assn. forecast.

United Airlines, the busiest carrier at Los Angeles International Airport and No. 3 at Orange County’s John Wayne Airport, has seen reservation rates for Thanksgiving travel increase by roughly 2% over last year’s figures, airline spokesman Joe Hopkins said.

Travel agent Marilyn Gibbons at Old Newport Travel in Newport Beach said this year’s Thanksgiving business is the best in memory. “The only problem we’ve had with Thanksgiving is finding space available on the airplanes,” Gibbons said.

But that doesn’t appear to be the case for New Year’s, she said. “People are tending to stay away from New Year’s because of the Y2K bug, I think.”

A number of airlines, which had added flights over the New Year’s weekend in anticipation of stepped-up bookings, have since canceled many flights for travel Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.

According to a recent poll by the Travel Industry Assn. of America, 76% of 1,500 adults surveyed said they were either “not at all likely” or “not very likely” to take a New Year’s holiday vacation. Only 14% said they were “very likely.”

Prices are apparently partly to blame. Hotels asking $2,000 a night and cruise ships asking double or even triple their normal New Year’s holiday rates have turned off many travelers.

Cruise lines in particular may have contributed to the New Year’s burnout. “They came out with this huge expectation that there would be a tremendous demand for millennium sailings, and they put a high price and all these nonrefundable restrictions on them,” said travel agent Patricia Campbell at All About Travel in Northridge “It scared people away.”

Carnival Cruise Lines, for example, recently offered a seven-day cruise departing Dec. 19 from Los Angeles to Puerto Vallarta for $1,140 per person. That same cruise leaving Dec. 26 and straddling New Year’s was going for $2,740 a person. Carnival spokeswoman Jennifer de la Cruz said prices for cruises this New Year’s are 20% to 30% higher than normal for voyages over Jan. 1, and that 12 of the lines’ 14 ships still had availability, some with a “fair amount.” Still, she said, booking rates are on pace to fill the New Year’s cruises.

Meanwhile, in the city synonymous with the famed New Year’s ball drop in Times Square, the New York Convention & Visitors Bureau has a list of more than 50 hotels still peddling special New Year’s packages. Perhaps only for a New Year’s celebration that is marked by the slow descent of a glittery ball made of Waterford crystal can a Best Western or a Comfort Inn charge $2,599 a night for room that normally goes for $329.

Despite the prices, Cristyne Lategano, president of the New York

Convention & Visitors Bureau, predicted that hotels in the city will do better business this New Year’s than last, surpassing 70% occupancy.

Out west, a miniature version of Manhattan has followed the lead of its model city. The New York New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas is charging $580 a night for a three-night minimum stay Dec. 30 through Jan. 1. That room ordinarily goes for $149 a night. Most other hotels in Las Vegas have implemented similar New Year’s hikes, from the Fitzgerald Holiday Inn in downtown Las Vegas ($450 for a room normally priced at $60) to the Bellagio on the Strip ($2,000 from an earlier rate of $359).

But what might be price-gouging to some is just admission to the party of a lifetime to others, said Rob Powers of the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority.

“In a free-market economy; the cost of something is whatever someone is willing to pay,” Powers said. “It’s a demand-driven issue.”

Still, the visitors bureau found itself having to stoke that demand last month when it launched a $2.5-million marketing campaign reminding consumers from Seattle to Chicago that hotel rooms were still available in America’s playground for the turn of the century.