UNEXPECTED TURBULENCE
Bradley International Airport enjoys earlier-than-anticipated surge in passengers, but industry woes cause headaches for some travelers
Bradley International Airport, whose promising passenger growth was stopped cold by COVID-19, is enjoying a surge this summer as pandemic-weary vacationers take to the skies, putting Connecticut’s largest airport at least six months ahead of where it expected to be in its recovery from a devastating travel downturn.
Bradley officials had predicted a quicker comeback in air travel than the broader airline industry, which had targeted 2024, but this summer’s strong bookings came as a surprise even to them.
“It’s a positive sign, but it’s also caused challenges in the industry,” said Kevin Dillon, executive director of the Connecticut Airport Authority, which oversees operations at Bradley.
“Once you park planes, it takes a bit of effort to get planes up and flying again. In a lot of cases, airlines had to rehire flight crews and are still in that process. Everyone is seeing that. This demand is returning a lot faster.”
Airline troubles — amid a nationwide surge in summer travel — are causing headaches for some travelers. There were thousands of flight cancellations last week alone — Spirit and American Airlines were among the hardest hit — leaving flyers stranded at airports across the country and scrambling to book with other airlines.
Ericka Aguilar and her sisters Vanessa and Jessica flew in to Bradley on July 30 from Denver on the low-cost carrier Spirit. They planned to visit a friend in the Navy at Groton for what they thought was going to be a brief weekend excursion. But when they arrived at the gate the following Monday to fly home, they were told a connecting flight from Florida had been canceled.
There wasn’t another flight until three days later and again a connection — this time from Houston — was canceled. Meanwhile, the sisters were racking up hundreds of dollars in extra hotel costs and, on Thursday, they were back at the airport no closer to finding a flight back home.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Ericka Aguilar said, sitting across from the Spirit counter with her sisters. “The reason we stayed with Spirit is because it was affordable. I know we will pay more with another airline, but we are going to pay more if we stay with Spirit and we’re told we can’t go.”
There was a possible flight Saturday.
“It was going to be a short trip,” Aguilar said, “but it hasn’t been a short trip.”
Last week, Spirit apologized for the widespread disruption in service. The airline blamed the cancellations on “operational challenges” such as weather, system outages and staffing shortages “that caused widespread irregularities in our operation and impacted crew scheduling,” the airline said in a statement.
The problems were intensified by the peak of the summer travel season with high occupancy among airlines, making rebooking difficult, Spirit said. The airline said it was shifting its employees to more quickly process vouchers for meals and hotel stays.
Spirit said it predicted that cancellations would continue to drop in the coming days.
Industry experts say the airlines are facing problems on multiple fronts in the face of unexpectedly strong bookings this summer. They include shortage of pilots, flight attendants and mechanics — either through layoffs or early retirements during the pandemic — that make it tough to quickly get more planes out of mothballs and into the air.
“I know that most people view flight attendants as like, ‘waitress in the sky,’ but that is actually not their primary role,” said Bryan Del Monte, president of the Aviation Agency, an air transportation marketing firm. “Their primary role is the safety and security of passengers.”
Del Monte said large numbers of flight attendants didn’t fly during the pandemic and aren’t up to date in training.
“So they just aren’t current and able to be in the sky,” Del Monte said.
Business travel on hold
At Bradley, Dillon, the CAA’s executive director, said he first started noticing an upturn in travel in March, and the passenger count, while still well behind pre-pandemic levels of 2019, is catching up.
Since the CAA was formed and took over management of Bradley in 2013, air passengers have increased 24% to 6.7 million in 2019, from 5.4 million. For the first six months of this year, there were 1.8 million passengers, compared with 3.3 million for the same period in 2019, off 45%.
Passengers using Bradley are watched closely because the long-standing goal has been to reach 10 million a year, which would require the construction of a second terminal. In March, passenger volumes were down about 54% compared with the same month in 2019. By May, the numbers were down 34% on the same basis.
In June, the latest numbers available, passengers were down 20% to 466,311 travelers compared with 582,256 for the same month in 2019. Dillon said he expected July to be off about 10% to 15%.
As with other airports, leisure travel is leading the way in passenger counts, but for recovery to maintain momentum business travel will need to start picking up in the fall.
Dillon said he is monitoring closely the reopening of offices, which many have pegged to September or later in the fall, and any longer-term fallout from the surge in the delta variant of the COVID-19 virus.
Last week, insurance giant Travelers Cos., a major employer in the Hartford area, said it would delay reopening its offices in downtown Hartford — originally scheduled for mid-September — by at least a month, a decision tied to the delta variant.
“It’s going to be very important to get that segment of the airline traveler back into seats,” Dillon said. “Business travel is the lifeblood of any airline.”
Dillon said he expects the first business travel to return will be companies visiting their clients.
“The big question in my mind is [whether] you will have the intracompany travel return or have companies become used to dealing with Zoom-type platforms for meetings,” Dillon said. “That’s one of the biggest questions people are trying to get their arms around.”
Even so, Dillon said passenger trends have been favorable enough so that most of the airport restaurants and other retail services have reopened. But like elsewhere, the airport has had a tough time recruiting workers, Dillon said.
Construction on a $210 million transportation center — part of the 20-year, $1.4 billion development plan — continued through the pandemic and is dramatically changing the airport. Scheduled for completion in May of next year, the center will be a hub for pickup and drop-off of rental cars, avoiding shuttle trips to off-site parking lots.
And Bradley, Dillon said, is again planning for other capital improvement projects, such as streamlining baggage check-in at ticket counters, that could tap into federal infrastructure funding being debated in the U.S. Congress.
‘It feels pretty normal’
At the peak of the summer travel season, not all travelers at Bradley were hit with disruptions.
Tano Desseno, a graduate student at the University of New Haven, arrived at Bradley on Thursday after a weeklong trip to Miami to visit a friend, ending a dry spell of travel since before the pandemic.
“It felt good, honestly,” Desseno said. “You can do pretty much what you were able to do before the pandemic with minimum requirements of vaccinations and masks. It feels pretty normal.”
Anthony Olson and his family were waiting to board their flight Thursday bound for Tampa, Fla., after spending a week visiting family in Morris, with a trip to a beach house in Westerly, R.I.
“It’s kind of annoying to still have to contend with the virus because it seems like there is no end in sight,” Olson said. “But it was great to see family, and it’s my feeling that it might get worse before it gets better, so this was a good opportunity.”
Olson said his youngest daughter, Sloane, 2, had never been on a plane. And, his older daughters, Laine, 5, and Ava, 7, couldn’t remember flying.
“We haven’t gone anywhere since COVID,” Olson’s wife, Emily said, then pointing down at her daughters. “It’s been a long time being quarantined together.”