ShareThisNAPLES, Fla. - A town called Holly sounds like a cozy place to spend Christmas.
Holly, in southeastern Michigan, hosts an annual Dickens Festival every December and is home to a ski and snowboard resort called Mount Holly.
But, for the Haneline family this year, Christmas with grandma beat out Christmas with Holly.
It was 17 degrees when the Hanelines left Holly to catch their flight to Southwest Florida International Airport.
"It's weird having palm trees, but we'll deal with it," said Karen Haneline, 51, waiting for her luggage with her teenagers, Josh, 19, and Sierra, 17, and husband, Rod.
The Hanelines are among more than 350,000 people expected to step off planes at Southwest Florida International Airport this December, the busiest month for the airport outside of the peak tourist season.
With big helpings of snow and frigid temperatures in the upper Midwest and Northeast so far this month, Southwest Florida's tourism industry is looking to rebound after the summer's hit from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and a sputtering economy that kept more people at home last Christmas.
"From all indications, we should be above where we were in 2009," Collier County tourism director Jack Wert said.
Arrivals are only half the story at Southwest Florida International Airport.
On the holiday's peak travel days, some 12,000 departing passengers per day will be going through the airport's Transportation Security Administration checkpoints, federal security director Robert Cohen said.
"We'll see some good crowds," Cohen said.
It's been smooth sailing at the airport this week, Lee County Port Authority spokeswoman Vicki Moreland said.
Moreland said several dozen flights were cancelled two weekends ago when a snowstorm grounded flights from Minneapolis, Chicago and Milwaukee.
The airport's three-times-per-week flight from Germany has been uninterrupted by Europe's snowbound travel chaos, Moreland said.
Standing in the sunlit concourse at of the airport on Tuesday, Debbie Syroney's wintry weather woes were melting away.
Syroney, 41, arrived early from Cleveland with her husband, John, and sons, Charlie, 8, and Jack, 6.
They were greeted by her sister, Sarah Collum, 32, of Estero, Fla., and were waiting for their parents, Pat and Frank Cammarata, to arrive from Buffalo, N.Y.
Syroney said Cleveland's cold weather has had her reaching for the soup and hot chocolate but she's expecting her diet to change.
"We're grilling down here," Syroney said.
(Eric Staats is a reporter for the Naples Daily News in Florida
