AAA Expects Fewer Travelers for Independence Day

AAA is expecting almost a million less travelers for this Fourth of July weekend than last year, despite the recent decline in gas prices and the agency's May forecast that more people would travel for Memorial Day than last year.

Thirty-nine million people will travel more than 50 miles from home for the holiday weekend, a 2.5 percent drop from last year, according John Townsend II, AAA Mid-Atlantic’s manager of Public and Government Affairs.

Townsend said the decrease was the cumulative effect of gas prices, which increased when many would make travel plans for the summer, but too late to affect existing Memorial Day plans.

“We saw an increase in travel [for Memorial Day] despite high gas prices,” Townsend said. “Nationally, it [gas] was over $3.75 for 60 days.”

Townsend said that the most affected form of travel would be automobile, and that AAA believes people who would travel by airplane or other means either had enough money to do so or spent time looking for deals.

Automobile travel will make up about 32.8 million of the 39 million expected travelers, according to an AAA press release. About 44 percent of people in a conducted survey said that rising gas prices would affect their travel plans.

AAA also expects about three million people to travel by air for the holiday, a nine percent increase from 2.75 percent. The change is also attributed to rising gas prices.

“The increasing cost of travel by car is making air travel a more viable option for some travelers, despite recent increases in air fares,” according to the release.

AAA doesn’t report forecasts for the summer travel season, but projected that 35 million people would travel during Memorial Day weekend,  a slight increase of two-tenths of a percent over Memorial Day 2010.

They estimated a one-tenths of a percent growth in travel from the South Atlantic region, which includes Virginia. Approximately 5.86 million people were expected to travel by car, and roughly half a million by air, according to the report, which was made by IHS Global Insight, an industry forecasting company.

AAA will release their complete travel forecast for the Washington, D.C. metro area on June 27.