Lindbergh Field has record 20M passengers
San Diego International Airport has reached a new milestone, surpassing 20 million passengers in 2015.
Credit an improving economy, most notably a still rebounding tourism industry, for helping boost traffic in and out of the airport, both domestically and internationally.
In all, 20,081,258 passengers boarded and disembarked planes at Lindbergh Field last year — a 7 percent increase over the more than 18.7 million passengers in 2014, the airport reported.
“Crossing the 20 million-passenger threshold is an important and meaningful milestone,” said Thella F. Bowens, president of the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority. “But more important is the fact that the airport has seen consistent and sustainable growth in the post-recession years.”
Put into perspective, LAX, the nation’s second-busiest airport, reported a record 74.5 million travelers in 2015, up 5.6 percent from the previous year.
There doesn’t appear to be any one segment of traveler, be it business or leisure or international, that is responsible for the growth in air travel in and out of San Diego, said Hampton Brown, director of air service development for Lindbergh Field.
“Travel is almost becoming an unsacrificed expense,” he said. “When someone wants to go somewhere, they just go, it’s less discretionary than it used to be.”
The record numbers are also in line with similar record-breaking performance in overall tourism to San Diego. Last year, more than 34 million people visited San Diego, half of whom were overnight visitors, according to the San Diego Tourism Authority. That 1.2 percent growth, though, wasn’t quite as robust as the increase in air passenger traffic.
While international air travel still accounts for a fraction of Lindbergh’s passenger volumes, it, too, broke records last year. Nearly 700,000 passengers last year arrived in San Diego on an international flight or departed from a foreign destination bound for San Diego, an increase of nearly 4 percent over 2014 and 11.3 percent over 2013.
While the airport’s single largest international market is Mexico, nonstop flights to London and Japan have clearly boosted overseas traffic in recent years. Brown said plans this summer for significantly more flights to Canada should boost international traffic for 2016.
And British Airways, which has seen high demand for its nonstop London flights during the summer, is moving from a smaller 275-seat Boeing 777 aircraft to a 747 that will accommodate more than 300 passengers, Brown said.
Looking ahead to future international expansion, San Diego has been in talks with airlines about securing more nonstop flights to Western Europe hubs like Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Munich but that could still be two to five years away, Brown said.
Domestically, Brown said he’d like to see more competition for routes to Washington, D.C., and the New York region, especially Newark.
“Latin America — central and northern South America — continues to be a priority for us,” Brown added, “but the problem with Latin America now is it’s in very deep recession. But because Europe is so strong, we need to look at some additional capacity to Europe.”
lori.weisberg@
sduniontribune.com
(619) 293-2251
Twitter: @loriweisberg
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