PEORIA, Ill. — Staffing issues that cancelled tons of flights on Labor Day weekend appear to be resolved ahead of Thanksgiving Day.
Peoria Director of Airports, Gene Olson, tells WMBD’s “The Greg and Dan Show”, those problems have eased quite a bit.
“The airlines have kind of reduced their schedules. They’ve gotten some more pilots and flight crews and ground staff, but they’ve also eased their schedules to handle more of what they can do…so we’re seeing reliability going up,” Olson says.
Olson says vacation destination flights are booked pretty high this week out of Peoria International Airport, with over 1,000 seats filled.
Meanwhile, fewer flights and fewer seats have pushed the price of airline tickets up a bit this holiday season. Travelers are paying about 25% more, or $100 more per ticket than they were last year, according to travel booking group Hopper.
Olson says that’s just in response to supply and demand.
“Our busy day is today (Wednesday) with 14 departures, and then our next busy day is Sunday with 14 departures. Those numbers are down, in our peak record years, we were getting 17 or 18 flights a day,” Olson says.
Olson adds, “There’s 90% of people traveling, but we’ve reduced the seats available by quite a bit.”
Some good news, as of Wednesday morning, all flights out of Peoria International Airport were on time, and a go for take-off.
For details on flights out of PIA, click HERE.
