Expect Big Crowds for the Summer Travel Season -- and Big Prices, Too

Travelers crowd the security queue in the departures lounge at the start of the Victoria Day holiday long weekend at Toronto Pearson International Airport in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, May 20, 2022. REUTERS/Cole Burston/File Photo
Travelers crowd the security queue in the departures lounge at the start of the Victoria Day holiday long weekend at Toronto Pearson International Airport in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, May 20, 2022. REUTERS/Cole Burston/File Photo
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Expect Big Crowds for the Summer Travel Season -- and Big Prices, Too

Travelers crowd the security queue in the departures lounge at the start of the Victoria Day holiday long weekend at Toronto Pearson International Airport in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, May 20, 2022. REUTERS/Cole Burston/File Photo
Travelers crowd the security queue in the departures lounge at the start of the Victoria Day holiday long weekend at Toronto Pearson International Airport in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, May 20, 2022. REUTERS/Cole Burston/File Photo

The unofficial start of the summer travel season is here, with airlines hoping to avoid the chaos of last year and travelers scrounging for ways to save a few bucks on pricey airfares and hotel rooms.

Some travelers say they will settle for fewer trips than they hoped to take, or they will drive instead of fly. Others are finding different money-saving sacrifices, The Associated Press said.

Stephanie Hanrahan thought she’d save money by planning ahead for her daughter’s birthday trip to Disney World in Florida. Instead, it ended up costing the same as the Dallas-area family’s trip for four to California last summer, so now her husband and son are staying home.

“We just had to grit our teeth,” said Hanrahan, a writer and speaker who also runs a nonprofit, as she and daughter Campbell waited for their flight last week at Dallas Love Field.

The number of people going through US airports hit pandemic-era highs last weekend, and those records are almost certain to be broken over the Memorial Day holiday.

AAA predicts that 37 million Americans will drive at least 50 miles (80 kilometers) from home this weekend, an increase of more than 2 million from Memorial Day last year but still below pre-pandemic numbers in 2019. The Transportation Security Administration expects to screen 10 million travelers between Friday and Monday, a 14% increase over the holiday in 2022 and slightly more than in 2019.

With more travel comes more expense. The average rate for a US hotel room last week was $157 a night, up from $150 in the same week last year, according to hotel data provider STR. And the average daily rate for other short-term rentals such as Airbnb and Vrbo rose to $316 last month, up 1.4% from a year ago, according to AirDNA, which tracks the industry.

There is a bit of good news for drivers, however: The national average for a gallon of regular was $3.56 at midweek, down from $4.60 at this time last year, according to AAA. Renting a car is also cheaper than a year ago, when some popular destinations ran out of vehicles. Travel company Expedia said larger inventories let the companies rent more cars at lower prices.

For air travelers, airline industry officials say carriers have fixed problems that contributed to a surge in flight cancellations and delays last summer, when 52,000 flights were nixed from June through August. Airlines have hired about 30,000 workers since then, including thousands of pilots, and they are using bigger planes to reduce flights but not the number of seats.

“I don’t have the hubris to tell you exactly how the summer is going to go, but we have prepared and we have a robust plan for it,” said Andrew Watterson, chief operating officer at Southwest Airline, which struggled at times over the summer of 2022 and suffered an epic meltdown around Christmas, canceling nearly 17,000 flights.

David Seymour, the chief operating officer of American Airlines, said his staff has fine-tuned a system it uses to predict the impact of storms on major airports and devise a plan for recovering from disruptions. He said it is reducing cancellations.

“It’s going to be a solid summer for us,” Seymour said.

In a report released last month, the Government Accountability Office blamed airlines for an increase in flight cancellations as travel recovered from the pandemic. It also said airlines are taking longer to recover from disruptions such as storms.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says the government will hold airlines responsible to treat passengers fairly when the carriers cause cancellations or long delays. But just like the airlines, the Federal Aviation Administration — the agency that manages the nation’s air traffic — has had its own staffing shortages and occasional technology breakdowns that have snarled air travel.

The FAA resorted to nudging airlines to reduce flights in the New York City area this summer, and it opened new flight paths over the East Coast to reduce bottlenecks.

“It’s going to be an ordeal — it’s always an ordeal to travel in the summer,” said travel analyst Henry Harteveldt, “but the airlines have done a lot to improve their ability to operate well this summer.”

Airlines hope that limiting the number of flights will improve reliability and reduce delays. So far, it seems to be working. About one in every 70 US flights have been canceled this year — half the rate of a year ago and lower than in 2019.

Limiting the number of flights also keeps prices above pre-pandemic levels.

A provider of travel data, Hopper, predicts that average domestic airfares will peak next month at $328 for a round-trip ticket, which is down from last summer’s record of $400 but 4% higher than in 2019.

There are some last-minute deals on domestic flights, Hopper found, but international fares are their highest in more than five years, with prices to Europe up 50% from a year ago.

The same thing is happening within Europe, as airlines hold the line on capacity at a time of strong travel demand.

“There is no expectation of seeing cheaper fares in Europe in the next seven or eight months,” says John Grant, an analyst for OAG, a UK-based travel-data provider.

For the travel industry, the big question is how long consumers can keep paying for airline tickets and accommodations while they try to deal with stubborn high inflation, news about layoffs and bank failures, and fear of a recession.

Industry executives say consumers are favoring the experience of travel over other types of spending, but some analysts see cracks in the strong demand for travel that began in early 2022.

Bank of America analysts say data from their credit and debit card customers showed a slowdown in spending in April, as card use fell below year-before levels for the first time since February 2021. They say spending on hotels, which rebounded relatively early from the pandemic, dipped this spring, while the late-recovering cruise industry is still steaming ahead — card spending on cruises rose 37% last month, although from very low levels a year ago.

“Travel remains a bright spot relative to other sectors, but we’re also seeing signs of moderation in the travel space,” said Anna Zhou, an economist for the bank.



Nobel Prize in Chemistry Honors 3 Scientists Who Used AI To Design Proteins - Life's Building Blocks

University of Washington computational biologist professor David Baker is speaks to coworkers at the University of Washington after receiving the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry on October 09, 2024 in Seattle, Washington. Alika Jenner/Getty Images/AFP
University of Washington computational biologist professor David Baker is speaks to coworkers at the University of Washington after receiving the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry on October 09, 2024 in Seattle, Washington. Alika Jenner/Getty Images/AFP
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Nobel Prize in Chemistry Honors 3 Scientists Who Used AI To Design Proteins - Life's Building Blocks

University of Washington computational biologist professor David Baker is speaks to coworkers at the University of Washington after receiving the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry on October 09, 2024 in Seattle, Washington. Alika Jenner/Getty Images/AFP
University of Washington computational biologist professor David Baker is speaks to coworkers at the University of Washington after receiving the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry on October 09, 2024 in Seattle, Washington. Alika Jenner/Getty Images/AFP

Three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins — the building blocks of life — were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday. Their work used advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, and holds the potential to transform how new drugs and other materials are made.
The prize was awarded to David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, computer scientists at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London.
Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the award honored research that unraveled “a grand challenge in chemistry, and in particular in biochemistry, for decades.”
"It’s that breakthrough that gets awarded today,” he said.
What is the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for? Proteins are complex molecules with thousands of atoms that twist, turn, loop and spiral in a countless array of shapes that determine their biological function. For decades, scientists have dreamed of being able to efficiently design and build new proteins.
Baker, 62, whose work has received funding from the National Institutes of Health since the 1990s, created a computer program called Rosetta that helped analyze information about existing proteins in comprehensive databases to build new proteins that don't exist in nature.
"It seems that you can almost construct any type of protein now with this technology,” said Johan Åqvist of the Nobel committee.
Hassabis, 48, and Jumper, 39, created an artificial intelligence model that has predicted the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have ever identified.
The duo "managed to crack the code. With skillful use of artificial intelligence, they made it possible to predict the complex structure of essentially any known protein in nature,” Linke said.
Why does this work matter? The ability to custom design new proteins — and better understand existing proteins — could enable researchers to create new kinds of medicines and vaccines.
It could also allow scientists to design new enzymes to break down plastics or other waste materials that would neutralize pollution, Baker told a news conference, or even come up with entirely new material for semi conductors.
“I think there’s fantastic prospects for making better medicines — medicines that are smarter, that only work in the right time and place in the body,” Baker told The Associated Press.
One example is a potential nasal spray that could slow or stop the rapid spread of specific viruses, such as COVID-19, he said. Another is a medicine to disrupt the cascade of symptoms known as cytokine storm.
“That was always the holy grail. If you could figure out how protein sequences folded into their particular structures, then it might be possible to design protein sequences to fold into previously never seen structures that might be useful for us,” said Jon Lorsch, a director at the NIH.
How did the winners react? Baker told the AP he found out he won the Nobel during the early hours of the morning alongside his wife, who immediately started screaming.
“So it was a little deafening, too,” he said.
Hassabis said he was just having a “normal morning” at home when he eventually got the call.
The Nobel committee didn’t initially have his number and first managed to get hold of his wife, but she hung up on them a few times, he told an online news briefing.
“They kept persisting and then I think she realized it was a Swedish number and then they asked for my number,” he said.
“It’s so incredible. It’s so unreal at this moment," said Jumper, a researcher and director at Google DeepMind. "And it’s wonderful.”
What was the role of AI? One of Britain’s leading tech figures, Hassabis co-founded the AI research lab DeepMind in 2010, which was acquired by Google in 2014. Among its past breakthroughs was developing an AI system that mastered the Chinese game Go and defeated the game's human world champion.
In the past researchers labored for months or years to decode the structure of a single complex protein.
But the AI model created by the DeepMind researchers, called AlphaFold, “can determine the structure of a protein pretty accurately within a few seconds or minutes,” Hassabis told the AP in an interview, adding that this saves researchers “years of potentially painstaking experimental work.”
The two research groups learned from each other's work.
Baker said Hassabis and Jumper’s artificial intelligence work gave his team a huge boost.
“The breakthroughs made by Demis and John on protein structure prediction really highlighted to us the power that AI could have," said Baker. “And that led us to apply these AI methods to protein design.”
Science has sped up, said Jumper. “It is a key demonstration that AI will make science faster "
It’s the second Nobel prize this year awarded to someone with links to artificial intelligence research at Google.
Nobel physics prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, 76, often called the “godfather of AI,” also worked at the California-based tech company until quitting so he could speak more openly about the potential downsides of AI.
“I’m hoping AI will lead to tremendous benefits,” Hinton told a news conference Tuesday. “I’m convinced that it will do that in health care."
"My worry is that it may also lead to bad things. And in particular, when we get things more intelligent than ourselves, no one really knows whether we’re going to be able to control them.”
More about the Nobels Wednesday’s chemistry prize winners represent a younger generation taking forward the work of the AI pioneers honored for physics, said Michael Kearns, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.
They are making AI models "scalable and practical and applying it to very important scientific problems.”
Baker gets half of the 11 million Swedish Kronor ($1 million) prize money, while Hassabis and Jumper share the other half.
The Nobel announcements opened Monday with medical researchers Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Hinton and fellow AI pioneer John Hopfield, 91, won the physics prize.
The awards continue with the literature prize Thursday, the Nobel Peace Prize Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.
The prize money comes from a bequest by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.