The Holiday Travel Myths You Should Never Believe

With the candy eaten and the costume photos emoji’d on Facebook, our cultural attention now turns to the holidays, and, more specifically, to all that dreaded holiday travel. After all, the holidays are the busiest travel season of the year and always a total nightmare, right? Not necessarily. Here are some travel myths people follow that you’ll give thanks to ignore.
         

1.You Should Fly On The Tuesday Before Thanksgiving

One of the most commonly held myths is that there’s a specific day you should be getting into the air. It tends to flip-flop between the Tuesday or Wednesday before Thaksgiving (depending on who you ask), but the basic idea is that if you avoid the “busiest travel day of the year,” you’ll have a much better turkey day. Except, well, Thanksgiving doesn’t even come close to being the hardest time to travel.

2.There Are More Delays On Thanksgiving

Allegedly, Thanksgiving sees more delays than any other time of the year, but the numbers don’t lie: Last year, the Thanksgiving holiday saw 15% of flights delayed and less than one percent of flights canceled in the US. That’s two percentage points below
the yearly average. Yep, that means you have a better chance of making your flight on “one of the worst travel days of the year” than you do on a random weekday.

3.The TSA Will Unwrap Your Presents And Take Your Food

It should tell you how sick the TSA is of this particular myth that they have a whole blog post about how, no, they probably aren’t going to unwrap your presents. That said, they do reserve the right to open wrapped packages if they set off an alarm or trigger a sensor, so consider leaving metal objects, electronics, perfumes, and the like unwrapped, and look at what needs to be checked as opposed to carried on.