51 Million U.S. Travelers Will Drive During the Thanksgiving Holiday

NEW YORK CITY—Location data company Arrivalist estimates 51 million U.S. travelers will use an automobile during the Thanksgiving holiday (Wednesday through Sunday). Volume is predicted to exceed 2019 road trips by 1.8 percent. Arrivalist’s Daily Travel Index has been trending positively for the last four weeks, showing a 5 percent increase in road trip travel over 2019 and a 7 percent increase compared to 2021 levels.

“Looming recession concerns and high airline ticket prices are driving travelers to hit the road this Thanksgiving,” said Arrivalist Founder and CEO Cree Lawson. “We expect this momentum to carry on throughout the 2022 holiday season. It will be exciting to see if 2022 road trip activity can beat the 2019 benchmark, as we have predicted.”

Originally launched in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Daily Travel Index was built as a free tool to help the travel industry track recovery. Arrivalist’s methodology is based on a representative balanced panel of GPS signals representing road trips taken specifically in cars (excluding travel by air). A trip is measured as one where the user has traveled a minimum of 50 miles and spent a minimum of two hours at the destination. Commuter travel or other frequently repeated trips—i.e., cargo deliveries or other reoccurring activities—are excluded from the Daily Travel Index.