Airport traffic climbs despite industry woes

Numbers topped 820,000 last year, but ‘volatility’ makes path to pre-pandemic figures rocky

Passenger traffic at Hamilton’s international airport rebounded to more than 820,000 travellers last year despite the loss of budget carriers in a major airline consolidation.

But ongoing “volatility” in the airline industry makes it hard to predict if the climb will continue back to pre-pandemic numbers of close to one million passengers.

Passenger levels at the cityowned, privately run airport plunged as low as 250,000 during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 — despite soaring cargo numbers — before bouncing back past 645,000 the next year.

The recovery continued in 2023, including 820,000 passengers and “the busiest summer we’ve had in the last 20 years,” airport head Cole Horncastle said in an interview Thursday.

That total represents the secondhighest number of passengers travelling to and from the Mount Hope airport in at least a decade, trailing only the pre-pandemic peak of around 955,000 in 2019.

But Horncastle, who presented a 2023 airport review to a city committee Thursday, also warned “volatility” remains a challenge in a contracting airline industry and will likely remain so for at least the next year.

“Every regional airport in Canada is feeling (these) pressures,” he said.

For example, Lynx Air shut down earlier this year, ending a brief tenure at the Hamilton airport that variously saw flights offered to Calgary, Vancouver and Halifax. WestJet, meanwhile, folded budget carrier Swoop and sun destination favourite Sunwing back into its regular operations late last fall.

How exactly that transition shakes out for the number of direct flights out of Hamilton this year is not entirely clear. But some popular western cities like Las Vegas and Abbotsford, B.C., have at least temporarily fallen off the map of destinations reachable from Hamilton.

Coun. Tammy Hwang asked Thursday if there was a plan to to try to get more airline service to west coast cities, pointing in particular to the loss of the popular Las Vegas destination.

Horncastle said Vantage Airport Group, which runs the facility, is in talks with “multiple carriers” hoping to bring back or add new destinations. “We know we have the market here … People want to fly from Hamilton.”

On a positive note, he said things appear to be going well for new airport partner airline Play, which offers flights to various European destinations via a stop in Iceland. In half a year, there were more than 175 Play landings at Hamilton.

Hamilton’s airport has seen one carrier shut down and two others fold under the WestJet banner in the last year