Nearly 2M people expected to travel through O'Hare, Midway airports by end of Thanksgiving weekend
CHICAGO (WLS) -- Sunday is the busiest air travel day for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
More than 254,000 people are expected to fly in and out of Chicago O'Hare Airport just Sunday. But while things are certainly busy, they appear to be moving.
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Long lines of passengers waited to get through TSA at O'Hare airport on Sunday afternoon and yet, the average wait times were only between 15 and 30 minutes. Travelers were being advised to arrive two hours prior for domestic departures and three hours for international.
"It was actually not packed at all, and all of our check-ins and stuff was under 10 minutes," said Maddie Genz, who arrived home Sunday.
"We left extra early, because we thought we would encounter a lot of people, and it was not bad at all," Melissa Genz added.
According to the Chicago Department of Aviation, some 1.8 million people will fly through both O'Hare and Midway by the time the Thanksgiving holiday weekend is over. At O'Hare, an 11% increase in passengers is being reported, with TSA officials continuing to credit the post-COVID-19 pandemic travel boom for the increase.
"Easy, easy. Always overrated. People complain but it's fine. I travel all the time," said traveler Anane Vora.
And while other parts of the country are experiencing some travel woes due to a winter snowstorm that hit parts of Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York over the weekend, Chicago's airports have seen minimal delays and cancellations.
"My flight today was delayed around 40 minutes, which isn't brutal. It leaves time for my girlfriend to pick me up from the airport, so everything worked out perfectly," said traveler Cole Wolksi.
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As for Midway, some 58,000 passengers are estimated to be flying through there Sunday.
Meanwhile, the first big snowfall of the season blanketed parts of New York, Pennsylvania and Michigan during the hectic U.S. holiday travel and shopping weekend, with numbing cold and heavy snow forecast to persist through the early part of the week and cause hazards in the Great Lakes, Plains and Midwest regions.
