As traffic booms, Pearson airport’s passengers pile up
With a 13-per-cent hike in flyers this summer, wait times to clear security fall well short of targets
Vacationers seeking an escape from Toronto will first have to brave daunting crowds at Pearson International Airport.
Pearson is in the midst of its busiestever summer season, according to figures released this week by the Greater Toronto Airport Authority. The airport is on track to serve 9.6 million people between Canada Day and Labour Day, up 13 per cent over the same period last year.
Passenger traffic during July and August is not only up, but it’s growing at a much faster rate than the year so far. The airport is on track for about a 6-per-cent bump over 2015, when it served more than 41 million people. The uptick is in line with recent annual increases, according to the GTAA.
“Managing that kind of phenomenal growth is challenging,” said Hillary Marshall, vice-president of stakeholder relations at the GTAA. “But we also recognize it’s a huge growth opportunity.”
Marshall said Pearson’s growing popularity is based on both the expanding local population — there are now 12.5 million people within a three-hour drive of the airport.
“Managing that kind of phenomenal growth is challenging. But we also recognize it’s a huge growth opportunity.” HILLARY MARSHALL GTAA VICE-PRESIDENT
There are also more connecting traffic driven by airlines such as Air Canada and WestJet. Connecting passengers now make up about 30 per cent of the airport’s customers.
“If you went back 10 years ago, we would have said that 100,000 passengers would be an extremely busy day for Pearson. We would point to the Friday before March Break as one of the busiest . . . and we’d get maybe 125,000 to 135,000 passengers,” Marshall said.
But over the past few years, summer has increasingly become the busiest travel season. From now until the end of August, Pearson expects to see close to 150,000 passengers a day on four separate Fridays, the busiest day of the week.
Marshall admits, “there are times when it’s challenging and we don’t keep up with international standards.”
The GTAA would like to have 95 per cent of its passengers through security screening within 10 minutes, a statistic it measures using the point when a boarding pass is first scanned to when it’s scanned again just before baggage screening.
That would bring Canada’s busiest airport within touching distance of facilities such as London, U.K.’s Heathrow, which sets a benchmark of getting 95 per cent of its customers through in five minutes or less.
But Pearson is a long way off that target. It only manages about 73 per cent within 10 minutes, according to Marshall. “So we feel that’s a challenge that needs to be addressed.”
Samantha Schmidt waited in line for a flight at Terminal 1 for more than 35 minutes Thursday afternoon. It was the Ottawa teacher’s first time using the airport in a while and it wasn’t an experience she’d like to repeat.
“I will definitely avoid Pearson in the future if I can,” she said. “It’s a zoo . . . I was little surprised at how backed up it was.”
Schmidt described herself as a laidback traveller who isn’t easily ruffled, but said the wait was much longer than she’s experienced at Toronto’s Billy Bishop Airport or other international airports.
The experience likely wasn’t made any more bearable by the fact that she was more than 12 hours into a gruelling chain of flights that was taking her from Munich, Germany, to Heathrow, to Toronto and on to Sault Ste. Marie, where she planned to visit her parents.
The GTAA has taken steps to reduce wait times. Last week, the agency announced a change to U.S.bound travel procedures. Instead of clearing customs and then going through security, passengers will now do it in the opposite order, which will eliminate the need for some passengers to leave the secure area and re-enter the system.
Pearson is also requiring U.S.- bound travellers to check their baggage before going through customs and security and has doubled its number of passport control kiosks, from 28 to 56.
Marshall said these measures do make the airport more efficient, but customers should still be prepared to wait longer than they’d like. “Passengers are seeing an impact, despite our best efforts,” she said.
Daniel-Robert Gooch, president of the Canadian Airports Council, said airports all over the country are lacking enough security personnel for the human-intensive work of screening customers efficiently.
His group is asking Ottawa to increase funding for the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority so the agency can hire more workers. With files from Oliver Sachgau and Vanessa Lu