ORLANDO, Fla. — Air travel affects are still lingering as people try to get home from the Caribbean. The operation in Venezuela caused the airspace to shut down for hours on Saturday night, canceling hundreds of flights.
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Several airlines have posted that more flights have been added to the schedule to help, but with the holiday volume from last weekend, it is taking some time to get everyone home.
Spectrum News spoke with a family that could not get home from Puerto Rico until Saturday; they flew to Orlando on Tuesday and rented a car to drive home to Atlanta.
Experts expect everything to be back to normal by the weekend.
On Tuesday, Spectrum News spoke with people at Orlando International Airport. Passengers who had flights originally booked for Tuesday were fine, but there were a few people who spent three extra days in Puerto Rico before finally catching a flight to Orlando.
It was the final few days of the holiday travel season.
“Great vacation, well planned out, down to a science,” Erica Matos said about her family vacation to Puerto Rico.
The Matos family spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s in Puerto Rico, but their trip ended with news of a U.S. strike in Venezuela.
“I am like, ‘Oh that is wow,’ and then when he wakes up I tell him the news, and he starts scrolling. And then 10 minutes later I hear check the Delta app,” Matos said.
Their flight home was canceled. “It was the shock of finding out that the earliest we could get home on our original reservation would be Saturday, which is a full week,” Matos said.
As bills stack up at home and they continue to pay for food and hotels on the island, they decided they needed to get home and re-booked their only option, a southwest flight to Orlando, then rent a car to drive the last six hours home to Atlanta.
“This really makes you pause and figure, ‘Wow, how quickly things can be disrupted.’ I was a person that flew during 9/11 and got stranded, so this was a little déjà vu,” Matos said.
It is not often you have airspace shut down for a military operation.
“Yeah, you talk about several hours, but several hours on, as you know, right on a holiday week,” said Dr. Blaise Waguespack, a professor of Management Marketing and Operations at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
Waguespack said the issue in getting passengers re-booked is not the planes; it’s the pilots and flight attendants. “Many of the models are based upon, in some regard, who is where, where is the plane, where is the people and how do we best manage this network to do the best we can in recovery,” Waguespack said.
He expects everything will be back to normal by the weekend, but for families like the Matos, they are blessed they had the resources to get back sooner. “Ready to get back into a routine,” Matos said.
Several airlines have posted that more flights have been added to the schedule to help, but with the holiday volume from last weekend, it is taking some time to get everyone home. But future flights have not been affected.