SEATTLE — Seattle airports, roads and waterways are gearing up for a busy weekend ahead of the 4th of July.
Washington State Ferries is warning passengers to get ready for longer wait times. AAA said Seattle will see some of the busiest roads in the country.
The same goes for airports across the country with 2.8 million people expected to fly Friday. Officials at Sea-Tac Airport are urging passengers to give themselves enough time to get to the airport.
Sea-Tac Airport saw 60-minute wait times at several security checkpoints by early Friday morning.
“The airport seems very filled," said one passenger who was heading home. "I woke up early because I don’t want to miss my flight back to Phoenix. It seems like a lot more, a lot more people traveling this weekend."
The airport was so busy Friday, airport spokesperson Perry Cooper expected to possibly break a record. The highest passenger volume ever was on one day in August of 2019 when there were 72,000 outbound passengers and 194,000 total passengers. But passengers volumes on Friday were expected to surpass that with a projected 74,000 people flying out and 200,000 passengers total.
These numbers are a challenge for the airport which says it has a smaller amount of space to work with than other big city airports and can’t expand outward.
“Even though we're growing larger with the number of passengers here, we just don't have the space right now to add anything more,” said Cooper.
The airport boosted the number of staff for the summer months and Cooper said TSA added more people to work security at the airport.
As of Friday afternoon, Cooper said wait times throughout the day on Friday had fluctuated anywhere from 15 minutes up to 55 minutes.
Passengers said they got to the airport early because they knew it would be busy.
“Very busy, a lot of traffic inside the airport and outside the airport too,” said Patricia Ramirez, who was traveling back to California.
Other passengers were facing cancelations. One man was supposed to fly out Tuesday night to go home to New Jersey, but he had multiple canceled flights with United Airlines and was rescheduled to fly out Saturday morning.
“Both times I was at the gate, and then came outside when I got the message about the flight cancelations,” said Chirag Panchal.
Panchal said his checked bags were already sent back to New Jersey.
“I'm without any luggage,” said Panchal. “I just have what is in my handbag with me and that's about it.”
The busy travel rush is on top of a more than $4 billion construction project taking place over the next five years that has left the drive coming into the airport closed for periods at a time.
With schools out, busy airport travel is expected all summer.
The airport encouraged travelers to download the flySEA app to check security wait times and reserve a spot in the security line using SEA Spot Saver.
Sea-Tac Airport celebrated its one millionth SEA Spot Saver user on Thursday, a technology that was first tested in Seattle and is now being used in other airports across the country.