Why the recovery of airport traffic is lagging behind other major travel hubs
Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, San Francisco International Airport consistently ranked among the top 10 busiest airports in the nation. Mineta San Jose International Airport had just smashed its record for the highest number of passengers in a single year. And, Oakland International Airport was aiming to resurrect a growth streak it had enjoyed for half a decade before a slight dip in 2019.
But the pandemic knocked them all off their stride. And today, more than 18 months after the coronavirus became a dreaded word, Bay Area airports are lagging well behind other major U.S. airports struggling to return to their heydays.
As of September 2021, both SFO and Mineta San Jose were serving about 54% as many passengers as in September 2019 and Oakland 68%.
Meanwhile, other major airports across the country, including Chicago O’Hare, Dallas and Seattle-Tacoma, are rebounding at a much faster rate, serving at least 77% as many passengers as they did in September 2019. And in Denver and Charlotte, air travel has surged almost all the way back to 2019 levels.
So what gives at the three Bay Area airports, which attract slightly different traveler groups yet have met a similar fate?
Experts say one possible explanation can be found in the region’s generally more cautious approach to dealing with COVID-19.
The Bay Area enacted the first shutdown orders in the nation in March 2020, and the world’s biggest technology companies, which are headquartered here, have yet to reopen their offices. Meanwhile, some major companies in other parts of the nation have been back in the office for months.
“As much as we all enjoy traveling here, we have shown consistently as a region that we are heeding the advice of health experts and that advice has, until recently, discouraged people from traveling,” said Henry Harteveldt, a San Franciscobased travel industry analyst.
“It’s a downward cycle for us,” he added. “Because we’re less likely to travel and because our recovery rate has lagged behind other airports, an airline is going to say ‘Well if I’m going to put a machine that costs $150 million into a market, do I send it to a major hub like Dallas or Atlanta or to one of the Bay Area airports?’ and at this point, they’re most likely going to choose the former.”
Another factor contributing to the airports’ slow recovery is that business travel, which many had expected to begin picking up as more people got vaccinated, couldn’t overcome this summer’s surge of the virus’ Delta variant.
Before the pandemic, major Bay Area tech companies like Apple and Google would regularly fly in employees and consultants from across the nation and globe for meetings and conferences, but now most of that interaction is taking place remotely.
While domestic and leisure travel have recovered more quickly, the outlook for the region’s airports remains foggy as long as international and business trips fail to soar once more.
“No one knows the day, the month or even the quarter that everything will be fully normalized,” said Mark Kiehl, director of air service development at Mineta San Jose, known by some as the airport of Silicon Valley. “I think we’re pretty resilient, but we have to get back up to speed, back into the offices in a hybrid approach or whatever it takes and then kind of turn on the business travel again.”
Additionally for SFO, which serves as a gateway for international travel between the U.S. and Asia, tight travel and quarantine restrictions on U.S. residents bound for Asia have been an impediment.
To offset their losses, airport officials have had to make difficult decisions.
At Oakland International, that meant delaying physical upgrades to its concessions. At Mineta San Jose, some expansion plans have landed on the backburner. And at SFO, more than $2 billion in planned capital improvement projects have been postponed, including renovation of Terminal 3, where United Airlines operates. The terminal upgrade has yet to be rescheduled, even though construction initially was supposed to start in the summer of 2020.