Thanksgiving expected to spur travel
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(CNN) - Travel agent Shirley Manning, 57, books thousands of flights a year, re-works snarled vacation plans for clients and calms the occasional tense traveler.
After 11 years in the business, Manning should be able to board an airplane without getting sweaty palms, and she once did - but not this year, as she and millions of others take to the nation's skies and roads for Thanksgiving. It is the heaviest annual travel period in the United States.
This year, says Manning, when she prepares to fly from Atlanta, Georgia, to San Francisco, California, to visit her aging parents, she will ask for some divine help to get there intact. The memories of the September 11 terrorist attacks are fresh, she says.
"I am a bit skittish about it," says Manning, who works for Travel Group, an agency in Roswell, Georgia, a suburb just north of Atlanta.
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"I definitely feel the need to see family, not only for a bonding reasons, but just to spend time with them," she says. "You don't know what the future brings, but you need to be with them, so I will sit there and bite my fingernails and pray the whole way."
Others share Manning's feelings, says Joe Brancatelli, editor and publisher of josentime.com, a Web Site for business travelers. "When you are looking at what holiday of the year people feel they have to be home, it's Thanksgiving," he says.
While Americans may feel the tug to be with relatives and loved ones for Thanksgiving, early travel indicators hint that more folks are choosing to stay put this year than last year, rather than risk a trip.
Figures released by the AAA before the crash of American Airlines flight 587 in New York last week indicate overall travel during the Thanksgiving holiday is expected to drop by 6 percent from last year. Automobile travel is expected to decline by less than 2 percent.
The predicted drop could be much worse, most travel professionals say.
"With all the recent doom and gloom in the travel industry, a 6 percent drop is a definite improvement from the double-digit declines of the last two months," says Sandra Hughes, the automobile association's travel vice president.
Brancatelli agrees. "One thing about September 11 is, it's driven people home into their own abodes," he says, "and Thanksgiving is the ultimate home-and-hearth holiday."
A need to connect
"I think we are going to see the return of people trying to see each other despite the tragedies and the recession," says Leonard Tuzman, director of social work services at Hillside Hospital in Long Island, New York.
A typical first reaction after trauma is to seek out family, says Tuzman, who was brought in to New York City following the September 11 attacks to counsel people directly affected by the collapse of the twin World Trade Center towers.
"For many, the frustration was the fear of travel versus the need to be with parents and children," he says. "With the holidays coming up, people are trying to make arrangements."
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For Jake Bailey, a 24-year-old research associate for Scully Capital, an investment banking firm in Washington, making arrangements to see family over the holidays means revving up his car's engine.
For Christmas, Bailey's family chose to meet for festivities at a midway point - his sister Katie's new home in Havelock, North Carolina. Everyone is traveling by car, and the terrorist attacks are part of the reason, Bailey says.
"Before we wouldn't have thought twice about flying," he says.
"Certainly because of all the stuff that has happened, people are saying 'Yeah, maybe we need to come closer together.' So getting together at holidays has more meaning this year. It's like a renewal," says Douglas C. Bachtel, a demographer with the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.
The nation is a diverse and mobile society, a scattershot collection of families that rely on fast, efficient and safe transportation to get to grandma's house for Thanksgiving, he adds.
"We don't all live on the same street where we grew up," says Bachtel.
Mobile society
The completion of the national highway system in the late1960s, the gradual reduction in air fares in the following decades and the relatively low cost of phone and e-mail communication do a good job keeping Americans connected to loved ones, says Bachtel.
But when terrorism strikes at the heart of our nation's transportation hubs, the violence highlights how very far apart physically most American families are from one another, and just how scary travel can be.
Manning, the travel agent, admits to a case of the jitters on a recent flight following the attacks. "I was just sitting there watching all the other passengers on the plane," she says.
This year, Manning's adult children are traveling from Atlanta to see family in Vero Beach, Florida, for the holidays.
"They are driving rather than flying," she says. "They have three children, and they feel more secure on the roads than in the air."
