Holiday travel: Higher costs, more hassles

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- If you're among the Americans traveling this holiday season, good luck. You'll need it, along with more cash.

Forecasts are for airports and highways to be fuller for the holidays, with higher prices and possibly more headaches. Government statistics show an increase during the first nine months of the year for some of the worst problems encountered by fliers: lost bags and overbooked flights.

Airline industry officials are warning there could be delays at airport security this holiday season because of new travel rules.

Those driving won't have to worry about those problems. But they will see gasoline prices comparable to year-ago levels, with AAA, the motorist organization, estimating an average price of $2.235 a gallon for unleaded regular, up 0.6 percent from a year earlier.

In addition, hotel and rental car prices are up. The government estimates that hotel prices in October were 4.4 percent higher than a year earlier, while rental car and truck rates are up 5.1 percent, both well ahead of the overall rate of inflation.

Meanwhile, figures from the Air Transport Association, the airline industry trade group, show the per-mile amount paid to fly rose about 10 percent on domestic flights in the first 10 months of this year, with a 6 to 7 percent increase on international routes.

And fares could be up even more during the holiday period. Sabre Airline Solutions, the airline consultant and software unit of electronic reservation system Sabre Holdings, estimates that Thanksgiving weekend fares will be up 25 percent over a year ago. And the early read on fares over the Christmas holiday travel period shows fares up 6 to 11 percent, depending on the travel day. But that increase could climb higher still as the holiday draws closer.

Still, AAA estimates that 38.3 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more from home this holiday, a 2.7 percent increase from 2005. Travel by car is forecast to be up 2.6 percent, while air travel is forecast to be up 3.2 percent.

The busiest days at airports will be Sunday and Monday of next week, not this Wednesday. The ATA estimates that about 2.5 million passengers will fly this Sunday and Monday, filling about 90 to 91 percent of seats. Wednesday is expected to see just a little more than 2 million passengers and 82 percent of seats filled.

But packed planes are nothing new at airports this year. The fare increases are a result of the airlines filling a record 80.5 percentage of seats during the first nine months of the year.

While the trade group estimates miles flown by paying passengers is up 1 percent through September compared to a year earlier, the same comparison shows capacity is down 1 percent.

Bankruptcies at Delta Air Lines (Charts) and Northwest Airlines (Charts), the closure of Independence Air in January and the merger of US Airways (Charts) and America West have cut the number of available seats.

It's not just higher fares that could cause headaches at the airport this holiday.

Bad weather in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California could snarl flights and cause delays. High winds and bad weather are also due in the Northeast later Wednesday. Weather is still, by far, the No. 1 cause of flights not arriving on time.

In addition, the ATA estimates that many of the more than 2 million daily U.S. airline passengers who will travel on the peak days during the next week will be making their first flight since new checked baggage restrictions were put in place as a security measure in August and adjusted in September. That could cause delays at security checkpoints that are even longer than normal.

"My anticipation is you get a lot more inexperienced travelers around Thanksgiving," said John Heimlich, chief economist for the ATA. "I'm sure there are many people who may not have traveled since August. It just takes a small percentage in every line to really tie things up."

In addition to the impact on fares, having airlines filling a record number of seats has resulted in an 11 percent increase in the number of missing bag reports over the first nine months of the year, compared to a year earlier. That works out to about 1,114 additional missing-bag reports filed daily by passengers during through September.

And the same time comparison shows a 24 percent increase in passengers who are involuntarily bumped off a flight because of overbooking. The overbooking problem and the potential check-in problems would both suggest passengers should try to get to the airport as early as possible.

Among the major airlines, Continental (Charts) has the highest rate of bumping passengers involuntarily over the first nine months of the year, according to federal statistics, with 1.85 involuntary bumpings per 10,000 passengers. That's a slight improvement from its 1.9 rate a year earlier, when it was also the leader.

JetBlue Airways (Charts) has the lowest rate of involuntary bumpings, with only 97, or 0.07 passengers per 10,000. But that's up from zero bumpings a year earlier.

US Airways has the worst record among major carriers on baggage complaints in the government report, with 7.69 reports per 1,000 passengers over the first nine months of the year, although that too is an improvement from its record a year earlier. The airline with the fewest missing baggage complaints is once again Hawaiian Airlines (Charts), which has only 2.98 such reports per 1,000 passengers.

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