Starting this Monday September 8, most U.S. airlines are undergoing major cutbacks—this is not pretty.

Starting right about now Continental is going to start parking nearly 70 planes, American Airlines about 80 planes, United more than 100, maybe 120, Midwest (one of my favorite airlines based in Milwaukee) will be cutting nearly one-third of its fleet, and Southwest will be cutting 200 flights from winter schedule.

Over at JetBlue they’re actually ending service between Boston and San Francisco, Boston and San Jose, Newark and LA-Ontario, Washington Dulles and Burbank, Dulles and Las Vegas, and Dulles and San Diego.

This is significant because when you’re looking at capacity cuts of up to 16 percent across the board, this isn’t just “fasten your seatbelts, this could be a bumpy flight.”

This is “fasten your seat belts, there may not be ANY flights!”

And then the flights that are there, watch out—can you afford one? We have 524 airports in this country that offer commercial airline service, and you’re gone see at least 10 percent of that service cut back over almost all those airports, and in some areas the ripple effect is not going to be insignificant.

For example in San Juan, American Airlines is cutting their daily flights in and out of that airport from more than 90 to just above 50—that more than 40 flights a day that will be gone.

If you’re a cruise passenger, and you need to connect with your cruise ship down there, that creates some problems in terms of frequency of service, capacity, of course, and let’s not forget the last big bad one—price.

Let me give you an example: I was pricing out a coach ticket year over year, meaning from 2007 through 2008, over Thanksgiving weekend. Last year, a transcontinental flight from Los Angeles to New York in coach was about $375-$380 round trip.

The year before it was about $290, so it went up about $90. You know what it is this year? $789. That’s coach! Wow, talk about feeling like a turkey to get to the turkey. That’s not good.

And, when you look at some other fare comparisons, it gets even worse: Between LAX and JFK fares on average are up 39 percent; Chicago to Miami – 12 percent; Detroit to San Diego – 19 percent; LaGuardia to Chicago – 57 percent; LAX to Seattle – 44 percent.

Do you really want to spend all that money just to see your dysfunctional family carve a turkey? Don’t go.

Delay the turkey a week if you can because the week after Thanksgiving is known in the travel industry as the “dead week.” That’s when nobody’s traveling because they’re recovering from that dysfunctional family get-together and the fares drop about 70 percent on most routes. That’s pretty wild, right?

But now when you start looking at the seats that are being taken out of the market by the airlines when they’re starting to cut capacity, it begins to really hit home. And where are they taking out the seats? In the places that you might consider the most popular: Orlando, Ft. Lauderdale, Las Vegas, Hawaii.

Hawaii seats are down 26 percent. Orlando is down 13 percent, that’s the number of available seats. Las Vegas is down 14 percent. This is scary stuff.

Now why are they pulling flights and seats from those airports when the flights are already full and everybody wants to go? It’s actually quite simple when you do the math. They’re not considered high-margin flights to the airlines. They’re considered leisure markets, and because of that, even when the plane’s full they can’t make money. In fact they sometimes lose money, compared to what they could do on those flights if they put the planes on overseas routes.

Now is there a silver lining here to all of this? Actually there is.

The silver lining comes in a bizarre way—on the overseas routes. Under deregulation any airline can fly anywhere in the United States and they can also stop flying anywhere without penalty. Overseas it’s a different story because of bi-lateral agreements between countries, and routes are heavily valued. If you’re an airline you don’t want to give up a route because then you’ll lose it.

So guess what? Between now and November 17 if you want to go to Europe or Asia, you can go bowling on most of those flights, which have about 35-40 percent load factors.

So not only are the fares down, this is the one window of opportunity in recent months, if not years, where you can actually redeem your frequent-flier miles. This is the time that you can actually get on a plane and redeem miles that they would otherwise never want to give away. But when you’re flying at a 35 or 40 percent load factor, not only do they want to give them away … they can’t wait to give them away.

Let’s not forget our friends at Amtrak and the bus lines.

For example, if you want to go from Memphis to New Orleans, a round trip is as low as $359 on AirTran, but you can do it on Amtrak for $100. Chicago to Detroit starts at about $170 on Northwest, but you can do it on Amtrak for $70, and on the bus for as low as $23.50. And the one thing that Amtrak never tells you about is that they actually have a 15-day rail pass. They never promote this, but it’s good for 15 days of rail travel in the U.S.

You get to hop on and hop off (you do have to make reservations) and it only costs $500. How about that!?!

From Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio- listen here.

Read more from Peter’s Travel Detective Blog.