This Thanksgiving travel season is expected to be the first significant increase in holiday travel so far this year. AAA is predicting 42.5 million Americans traveling 50 miles or more from home — a four percent increase from last year.

“Driving AAA’s projected increase in the number of Thanksgiving travelers is pent-up demand from Americans who may have foregone holiday travel the last three years,” said Bill Sutherland, vice president, AAA Travel Services.

AAA estimates that approximately 38.2 million people will use roadways.

Barring any unforeseen circumstances, the prediction is that retail gasoline prices will remain low during the Thanksgiving traveling season, according to Gregg Laskoski, senior petroleum analyst for GasBuddy.com, an online retail gasoline price watchdog. According to AAA’s Daily Fuel Gauge Report on Sunday evening, the average price of a gallon of regular gas was $3.24/gallon in Ohio.

Laskoski also predicted that there could even be a 5-cent drop in retail gasoline prices before Thanksgiving.

Almost 3.4 million people will fly to their destination, a 1.8 percent increase compared to last year.

Officials with the Air Transport Association of America believe that passengers can expect full flights. The ATA is predicting about 23.2 million air travelers will fly on U.S. carriers’s domestic and international routes during a 12-day period of the holiday, which is down compared to the 23.6 million who flew over the Thanksgiving period last year.

“Airlines have begun to reduce capacity and limit the number of seats available for sale due in part to rising cost pressures,” said John Heimlich, ATA Vice President and Chief Economist.

The busiest Thanksgiving season travel days for Dayton and the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport are Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the Sunday after Thanksgiving, according to airport officials.

Dayton International Airport does not keep track of how many people fly out of the airport during the Thanksgiving season, but Linda Hughes, airport spokeswoman, said the airport typically has approximately 3,000 passengers that depart from the airport per day.

The number of passengers who flew out of Dayton in November of last year increased to 105,289 from 94,993 in 2009.

Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky had more than 8,100 local passengers go through security screening the Wednesday before Thanksgiving of last year, according to Barbara Schempf, director of the airport’s public and government affairs.

The airport had more than 10,100 local passengers on the Sunday after last year’s Thanksgiving.

“We expect similar numbers from a local passenger perspective,” Schempf said of this year’s Thanksgiving travel.

Nearly 530,000 passengers traveled through Port Columbus in November of 2010 and airport officials expect that number to remain steady at the end of this month, according to Angie Tabor, Columbus Regional Airport Authority’s manager of Communications.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2414 or kwynn@coxohio.com