Holiday Travelers Make Way Through Busy Crowds At City's Airports
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Tens of thousands of travelers crowded O'Hare and Midway airports on Wednesday, as they head out for the Christmas and New Year's holidays.
In all, city officials expected more than 4.6 million people to travel through Chicago's two airports between December 18 and January 5.
Wednesday was expected to be the busiest day of the holiday travel period at Midway International Airport, with more than 68,000 passengers expected to use the airport.
O'Hare International Airport, holiday travel is expected to be up by 8 percent over last year, with more than 3.5 million travelers overall during the Christmas and New Year's holidays.
Due to the weather in Chicago and around the country, O'Hare is experiencing delays of 30 minutes for inbound and outbound flights and Midway is experiencing delays of 15 minutes as of 8:30 p.m. To check the status of your flight status, visit flightaware.com.
Airlines were advising travelers to get to the airports two hours before their scheduled departure for domestic flights, and three hours early for international flights. If you're bringing gifts, don't wrap them. While it's not against the rules, airport security might have to open them, so it's better to save yourself the trouble of having to re-wrap any presents.
Early Wednesday morning, lines at check-in counters and security checkpoints were downright awful, though the situation was much better by late morning.
Avni Patel was flying to California early Wednesday, and worried she might not make her flight, after seeing the massive lines at O'Hare.
"I was not expecting this, and I didn't come early enough, so shame on me," she said. "I'm hoping I'm going to catch my flight."
Julie Sholl said she's never seen the lines as long as they were Wednesday morning at O'Hare.
"It's very, very crowded today," she said.
Things improved around noon, but CBS 2's Sandra Torres reports lines started to pick up again late in the afternoon.
"I've never seen it this way," said Ralph Cahn. "Shocking."
Fort Lauderdale bound Matt Hiatt was ready.
"I got the Steve Jobs book," he said. "It's 560 pages."
Fortunately for flyers, the lengthy lines were down half by 6:30.
"It's nice that it's not as busy as it was before," said Cristina Sanchez, who was flying to Los Angeles.
According to the AAA, more than 100 million people were expected to make a holiday trip of at least 50 miles for Christmas or New Year's, the first time holiday travel was projected to be that busy in the U.S.