Here’s how many passengers Sky Harbor had at Thanksgiving
Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a strong warning urging people to stay home to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Despite the warning, airports across the country saw some of their heaviest traffic since the pandemic erupted last March.
But, according to hourly checkpoint statistics from the Transportation Security Administration reviewed by The Arizona Republic, while airports were busy compared to earlier in the pandemic, it does appear many travelers did heed the warnings. TSA agents in Phoenix screened far fewer passengers in November 2020 than in years past.
Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport released statistics on Dec. 29 showing that passenger traffic in November was down 51% year over year. In November 2020, 1.8 million passengers arrived at or departed from Sky Harbor, compared to 3.7 million in November 2019. Passenger traffic statistics lag by a month and figures for December will be available in late January.
The numbers show that Sky Harbor’s 2020 passenger traffic is down 52% compared with 2019. The airport served
a little more than 20 million travelers from January through November 2020. During the same period in 2019, the airport saw more than 42 million passengers.
Thanksgiving traffic at Sky Harbor Airport
The Sky Harbor statistics don’t break down the number of travelers by day, nor do they show what it looked like specifically during the Thanksgiving holiday travel window. That’s important because the airport typically sees significantly more passengers daily over
the holiday period compared to earlier in the month.
So The Republic examined new figures from the TSA that show the number of passengers the agency screened each hour at each checkpoint over the holiday.
Those statistics show that TSA agents screened 218,641 passengers from Nov. 22-29, 2020. At peak times, the agency had every checkpoint open, a change from its pandemic practice of using just the A and C checkpoints in Terminal 4 because of reduced traffic.
Heather Shelbrack, spokesperson for Sky Harbor Airport, said the TSA numbers represent slightly less than half of the total number of passengers traveling through the airport “because they do not count arriving passengers or connecting airline passengers within the same terminal.”
How does that compare to 2019? Shelbrack said that on peak travel days during that holiday season, the airport saw 140,000 to 150,000 passengers in a single day.
Busiest Thanksgiving 2020 travel days
The busiest travel days around Thanksgiving 2020 were the Wednesday before and the Sunday after. Here’s how many passengers were screened at Sky Harbor Airport each day of the Thanksgiving holiday week.
● Sunday, Nov. 22: 28,909.
● Monday, Nov. 23: 27,054.
● Tuesday, Nov. 24: 26,932.
● Wednesday, Nov. 25: 31,297.
● Thursday, Nov. 26 (Thanksgiving): 15,535.
● Friday, Nov. 27: 23,169.
● Saturday, Nov. 28: 29,552.
● Sunday, Nov. 29: 36,193.
You can connect with Arizona Republic Consumer Travel Reporter Melissa Yeager through email at melissa.yeager@azcentral.com.