Get ready for a busy travel session this Memorial Day weekend. While this national holiday has no real gift-giving associated with it, Memorial Day has a big contribution to the economy. It marks the official start of the summer break for many students and families, and it is the unofficial start of summer for the rest.

In short, this is a huge economic event. It is not just the money spent on gasoline. It is the airline tickets, hotels, car rentals, extra meals out, alcohol, sun block and myriad of other things that get purchased along the way.

AAA has forecast that Americans will drive more this Memorial Day than last year — some 36.1 million people will drive more than 50 miles from home during the holiday weekend. This is a gain of 1.5% from 2013, but it is the second highest in travel volume since 2000. This gain may not just be the gain in the employment picture nor the economy — AAA said that rising temperatures and improvements in several key personal economic factors are driving the expectation for more holiday travelers this year.

AAA showed that more than eight in 10 travelers will go to their destination by car between Thursday May 22 and Sunday May 26. Fortunately, there has not been a major change in gasoline prices from last year.

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Holiday air travel is now expected to rise by 2.4% to 2.6 million leisure travelers. Also, other modes of transportation including cruise, trains and buses were projected to get the best boost of 6.5% to another 1.7 million travelers.

Travelers are also expected to see slightly higher prices, with airfares some 6% higher (thanks airline mergers!), mid-range hotels up 2% and car rentals costing 1% more than in 2013.

So, what is it all worth? It piles up quickly. AAA used $3.63 or slightly higher per gallon of gasoline. Other considerations are as follows from the AAA’s Leisure Travel Index:

• Hotel rates for AAA Three Diamond lodgings are expected to rise 2%, with travelers spending an average of $169 per night, versus $166 last year.
• Hotel rates for AAA Two Diamond hotels are up 3%, with an average cost of $124 per night.
• Weekend car rental rates will average $44 per day.
• Average round-trip airfares, discounted fares for the top 40 U.S. routes, are up 6% to $227 from $215 last year.

If we try using some highly rounded numbers, at three days and nights, we can get an idea of what gets spent. It is massive:

• 36.1 million people in cars, let’s say 18 million cars as a guess, at a magical guess of eight gallons round trip, at $3.63 per gallon — $522.7 million for gasoline.
• Hotel rooms — American Hotel and Lodging Assn. says there were 4.9 million guest rooms and the average occupancy per year is 61.4% — let’s say 80% occupied for three nights and split the difference in the AAA average room rates at $145 (rounded down) — over $1.7 billion in hotel rooms.
• Rent cars — Auto Rental News showed 1.95 million average cars in the entire U.S. rental fleet, so let’s assume an average of 80% booked for three nights at $44 per day — rental car expenses would be $205 million.
• Airfares for 2.6 million at $227 per ticket (without BS airline add-on fees) — $590 million.
• Other travel, at 1.7 million people, assume only $100 round trip — $170 million.
• Let’s just add $20 in food, just $10 in extra beverage expenses (beer, wine, soft drinks, bottled water) and an extra $10 on average just in basic incidentals for all those 40 million or so travelers, for a total of $40 each — another $1.6 billion.

So, the grand total for the travelers is somewhere close to $4.8 billion.

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Keep in mind that this is just the calculation from the travelers, and it is using some guesswork on raw numbers, but should give a fair benchmark. Now consider those other 270 million or so Americans who are having a “staycation” for the three-day weekend. If you use no money on the hotels, long-distance gasoline travel, airline and the like, and pretend that just one-third of the Americans will have the extra $40 in assumed expenses, that is another $3.6 billion that they would have spent.

Our guess is that the numbers are even much more than this. We admit that many of the numbers are guesses, but we included not a dime from incidental clothing, hats, luxury items and the like. What you can see is that Memorial Day is easily worth billions to the economy.

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