MYNORTHWEST NEWS

AAA won’t forecast Memorial Day travel for first time in 20 years

May 14, 2020, 8:38 AM | Updated: 10:16 am

Airport, Memorial Day travel...

Check-in counters sit nearly empty at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in March 2020. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

(Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

What will Memorial Day weekend travel look like this year? Typically we’d depend on AAA’s annual forecast to tell us, but this year, things are far more unpredictable.

With Washington’s stay-at-home order in effect until after the holiday, it’s likely there won’t be as many people on the road as in typical years.

Travel is difficult to predict right now, to say the least. So for the first time in 20 years, AAA is choosing not to provide a yearly forecast. The data it normally uses just isn’t reliable, with fewer of us traveling anywhere right now.

If passengers cancel flights over COVID-19, should they get refunds?

Last year, 43 million Americans went somewhere over the three-day holiday weekend in May, the second highest travel volume on record for all the years AAA has followed the trends.

The lowest Memorial Day weekend travel recorded came in 2009, as the nation came out of the Great Recession. Nearly 31 million people traveled over that weekend, a number that we seem destined to be below in 2020.

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AAA won’t forecast Memorial Day travel for first time in 20 years