Thanksgiving insurance claims

On travel, trust, and why this single week should change how U.S. insurers think about value.

Just as another year passes by, we all have a lot to be thankful for, celebrate, and reflect on. The same applies to the ever-dynamic insurance industry. From ravishing potluck dinners to nostalgic reunions with loved ones, the season brings mass travel, a spike in drunk-driving incidents hidden under the veil of celebration, baggage mishaps, and a flood of claims. And the real food for thought is this: Is your insurance software system built to keep up when your customers are on the move? Read along.

We are bringing data to the table that depicts why exactly insurers should ditch legacy systems off the table like a cold turkey.

We have carefully compiled some real data truths that can be a complete eye-opener for the insurance leaders, holidaying through the Thanksgiving season.

• Nearly 82 million Americans are expected to travel during Thanksgiving 2025, marking the highest holiday travel volume in recent years.
• Behavioral risks rise with higher travel volumes from 2019 to 2023, analyses show a sharp rise in drunk-driving fatalities during Thanksgiving windows, totaling 868 deaths.
• According to Statista, in 2024, U.S. airlines reported a significant number of mishandled-baggage incidents. Find more data trends in the 2024 SITA Global Baggage Report.
• Amtrak saw double-digit early booking growth for 2025 Thanksgiving routes, adding another reason for risk and service expectation.

When 80-plus million people move together, small delays become systemic problems. Delayed flights outgrow missed connections and surge claims; baggage mishandling multiplies into thousands of unhappy customers; roadway incidents cluster into severe loss.

According to Insurance Business America, 74% of insurers continue to rely on legacy tech. Legacy systems and thanksgiving season is a deadly combination like ketchup on sausage, -“not classy and out of date.” Migrating to modern systems gives way to real-time data pipelines, instant insights, and scalable architecture, letting insurers respond quickly, accurately, and with agility.

Trying to manage Thanksgiving-week claim surge with decade-old legacy systems is like an attempt to modernize on foundations that were never built for it.

This autumn witnessed staffing and control-room disruptions like a sticky wicket that caused tens of thousands of flight delays and cancellations across major U.S. hubs, reminding us how dependent claims flows are on third-party systems.

According to a 2024 report by EPAM, 45% of insurance executives see legacy infrastructure as the top barrier to adopting modern, digital tools. Old legacy systems cannot simply handle peak loads of data, and thanksgiving season brings one of the highest annual surges in auto, travel, and property claims. Holiday claims are volatile and can change abruptly, putting legacy systems on a spot, incapable of drawing insights from live weather, traffic or airline-delay data, delaying payouts and escalating customer frustration. Adjusters end up drowning in paperwork and duplicate entry at the exact moment customers expect instant support.

How Celsior can help

Adjusters no longer have to swim through policy pages or chase data across federal websites that love going “temporarily unavailable” at peak hours. With Celsior, the whole story lands in one clean view. We have listed the core services of our tech stack that can benefit every modern insurer in these unprecedented, but significantly happy times.

1. Real-time, multi-source data pipelines: We connect insurers to live travel, weather, traffic, airline delay, and event data. So, claims are validated instantly, even when public feeds are noisy or overloaded during Thanksgiving week.
   
2. High-volume–ready infrastructure: Our ingestion engines and scalable architecture are built for peak-load weeks like Thanksgiving without any risk of system crashes.
   
3. Automated triage and severity scoring: We embed behavioral, temporal, and location-based risk signals directly into the claims flow, speeding up payouts where liability is clear.
   
4. One unified view across auto, travel, home and specialty: We break down data silos by stitching together structured and unstructured data from every line. Adjusters get the full story immediately instead of jumping between outdated systems.
   
5. Explainable AI and full lineage for every decision: Every automated decision including payout, investigation, and escalation comes with traceable reasoning.
   
6. Instant micro-payout capability: Where the insurer wants to offer small instant payments such as baggage delay, missed connection essentials, small auto damages, Celsior enables automated pre-authorization.
   
7. Failover resilience when public feeds break: Thanksgiving often overloads travel APIs, airport feeds, TSA data, and traffic sensors. Celsior provides:
   
   – Fallback APIs
   – Cached historical patterns
   – Alternative data pathways
   
8. Proactive alerts before claims even arrive: Our prediction layer identifies emerging hotspots such as severe weather zones, congestion spikes, and cancellation waves, and pushes alerts to carriers. According to the official website of TrafficSafetyMarketing, 174 people died in drunk-driving crashes, in which one or more drivers had a blood alcohol level of 0.08 or higher, during the 2023 Thanksgiving holiday. This gives us more than enough clues to be on the edge, since things can go wrong at any moment.

Fix the real weak link: Your infrastructure

Thanksgiving brings joy, chaos, travel, risk, and responsibility, not just for families, but for insurers too. When people are on highways, in airports, or waiting for baggage that never arrives, they’re not looking for policies; they’re looking for presence. It’s high time we start building systems customers can trust, especially when the country is on the move. We’re ready when you are. Reach us today!

Author:
Ritesh Koul, SVP, Digital Delivery & Innovation