ORLANDO, Fla. \u2013 Orlando International Airport expects more than 155,000 passengers on Labor Day, making Monday one of the busiest days of the holiday travel period.<\/p>\n
However, overall passenger traffic is projected to fall compared with last year.<\/p>\n
MCO expects 841,577 arriving and departing passengers from Thursday through Tuesday. That is nearly 50,000 fewer passengers than the approximately 891,000 travelers recorded during the same period in 2025 \u2014 a decline of about 5.5%.<\/p>\n
The drop comes despite AAA ranking Orlando as the country\u2019s second-most-popular domestic destination for Labor Day travel.<\/p>\n
One major change since last year is the closure of Spirit Airlines in May. Before shutting down, the low-cost carrier accounted for roughly 1 in 10 passengers at MCO.<\/p>\n
But fewer passengers are not translating into cheaper holiday flights.<\/p>\n
AAA says round-trip fares to popular domestic destinations such as Orlando are up nearly 20% from last year, averaging about $790.<\/p>\n
Amanda Buehring, who traveled to Orlando from northern Wisconsin with her family, said the holiday weekend made their return trip more expensive.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously, it\u2019s a little bit more expensive with the holiday weekend and everything,\u201d Buehring\u00a0said.<\/p>\n
Buehring\u00a0and her family arrived Thursday, hoping to avoid some of the higher holiday prices. She said the strategy worked.<\/p>\n
The family visited three theme parks during the trip, but their journey home Sunday was delayed by about two hours.<\/p>\n
The rising cost of airfare can make a full family vacation difficult to afford, Buehring\u00a0said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou want people to come here, but to be able to afford it for regular people, it\u2019s kind of hard to actually plan a full vacation with your family,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Despite the projected decline in overall passenger traffic, airport officials are urging travelers to arrive at least two hours before their scheduled departure.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 by WKMG ClickOrlando – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ORLANDO, Fla. \u2013 Orlando International Airport expects more than 155,000 passengers on Labor Day, making Monday one of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392346,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[11687,11254,2450,6205,1335,139,141,3847,140],"class_list":["post-392345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-air-travel","tag-holiday-travel","tag-labor-day","tag-mco","tag-orange-county","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-international-airport","tag-orlando-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}