Travelers, pack your patience along with presents. The AAA is predicting that airports will be the busiest they’ve ever been over the holiday period. The airfare-tracking site Hopper says 24.5 million seats will depart from U.S airports from December 21st through December 27th, an 11% increase from capacity scheduled for Christmas last year.

Hopper is predicting that Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport will see the largest volume of holiday travelers, with nearly 1.5 million departing passengers over Christmas week. Denver and Dallas/Fort Worth airports will also see more than one million passengers depart during the busy holiday period.

The combination of higher volume and winter weather can spell flight disruptions. Last year more than 31,000 flights were canceled in the last two weeks of December, and more than 122,000 flights delayed, according to data from Hopper.

To mitigate the risk of encountering a flight delay or cancellation, Hopper recommends booking an early-morning flight. “In general, flights departing after 9 am are twice as likely to be delayed than departures scheduled between 5 and 8 am,” according to Hayley Berg, the company’s lead economist and the author of Hopper’s Holiday Travel Disruption Outlook. What’s more, there is often a domino effect, where one delayed flight leads to a second and then a third.

Kathleen Bangs, a former commercial airline pilot and current spokesperson for FlightAware advises travelers to keep tabs on potential hiccups with a tool called “Where is my plane now?” Just enter your flight information, click the link under the flight number, and you’ll be able to see if your plane is ahead of schedule, on time or behind schedule and act accordingly. (Forbes)