Sunport traffic rebounds from pandemic
Data shows airport nearing pre-COVID traveler count
Passenger traffic at New Mexico’s largest airport is getting closer to prepandemic levels, according to the latest annual data.
The Albuquerque International Sunport saw 4.4 million passengers in the 2022 fiscal year that ended June 30. That’s more than double the number of travelers who moved through the facility in 2021 and about 80.7% of the traffic it experienced in 2019.
“We’re very happy to be kind of inching closer to those pre-COVID numbers,” Sunport spokesman Jonathan Small said.
The Sunport had 419,056 passengers in the month of June, about 82.6% of what it had for the same month in 2019.
Nationwide, air travel seems to have rebounded even more.
The federal Transportation Security Administration screened an average of 2.27 million people per day at its checkpoints in June 2022, according to a recent news release. That’s about 88.7% of the volume it saw the same month in 2019.
The Sunport has in recent months been closer to prepandemic numbers than it was in June.
In May 2022, its traffic was 97.7% of 2019 levels and in April it was 90%, according to Sunport data.
While the improvements have been encouraging, Small said it’s unclear what to expect moving forward.
“It’s still really hard to forecast these days,” he said. “It’s still kind of new territory when it comes to the effects of the pandemic.”
The Sunport had a lot of ground to make up, as air traffic had withered during the pandemic. April 2020, for example, was just 4% of what it had been the year prior, and even April 2021 was only about 53% of prepandemic levels.