Travel Uptick: Airlines, Hotels Hope Holiday Weekend Travel Revival Points To COVID-19 Comeback

For a travel industry looking for a glimmer of hope, the latest holiday-week statistics offer some encouragement, with hotels seeing an uptick in room occupancy rates and airlines filling more seats.

The number of people passing through Transportation Security Administration airport checkpoints surpassed 300,000 for the first time in almost two months, it reported on its website. Numbers spiked on Thursday, May 21, and Friday, May 22, leading up to the three-day Memorial Day weekend, and again on Monday.

For the week ending May 23, tracking firm STR found that hotel occupancy in the U.S. averaged 35.4%, up from 32.4% in the previous week - though still down by about half from the comparable week in 2019.

"The steady climb in national occupancy continued, and to no surprise, the highest levels were recorded on Friday and Saturday ahead of Memorial Day," said Jan Freitag, STR's senior vice president of lodging insights, in a statement.

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