Everyone dreads holiday travel, but at SEA Airport, this holiday season has been smoothed inside the terminal, with shorter security lines and less congestion than expected — and all of that was by design.

Airport spokesperson Perry Cooper tells KIRO Newsradio roughly 870,000 passengers traveled through SEA between Wednesday and Monday of the Thanksgiving holiday period. That’s about 3% below projections and 1% lower than last year — even though outbound checkpoint traffic was actually up 3%. The dip came from fewer connecting passengers, not fewer people flying out of Seattle.

SEA is one of the top 15 busiest airports in the nation, serving more than 52 million travelers in 2024. Their numbers are comparable to San Francisco International Airport, Newark Liberty, Phoenix Sky Harbor, and

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