Boise air travelers weather storms, canceled flights amid pandemic for year-end holidays
Boise Airport was among the scores of air travel hubs nationwide caught up in canceled flights over the busy holiday weekend, and extending into early this week.
Thousands of passengers were kept from boarding a couple of dozen flights to and from Boise because of a mix of airline staffing shortages related to COVID-19 and inclement weather rolling across the West. Four of Boise Airport’s seven air carriers and their partner airlines were affected, according to FlightAware, an aviation data website.
The flight cancellations, which totaled in the thousands across the U.S., didn’t hit Boise until after Christmas Day, however, with the greatest impacts felt Sunday. Alaska Airlines, based in Seattle, and sister airline Horizon Air accounted for eight of the 12 canceled flights that day. Most of those routes were between Boise and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, which got hit with atypical winter weather.
Those same cancellations then stretched into Monday and Tuesday. Other routes that never took off included Austin, Phoenix, Portland, Spokane and Salt Lake City.
“Severe winter weather in the (Pacific Northwest) is having a significant impact on our operations,” an Alaska Airlines spokesperson told the Idaho Statesman on Monday by email. “This resulted in the cancellation of 248 mainline flights that were scheduled to arrive or depart Seattle Sunday.”
Alaska canceled another 214 flights nationally Monday, including six more to and from Boise, the spokesperson said. SkyWest Airlines, which operates flights on behalf of Alaska, as well as American Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines canceled a dozen flights at Boise Airport from Sunday through Tuesday, including half along the Boise-Seattle route.
“Canceling a flight is always Delta’s last resort,” John Laughter, the airline’s executive vice president and chief of operations, said in a Monday news release. “The result is not only difficult for customers, but for our people who want nothing more than to take care of them — especially over the holidays. We sincerely apologize to everyone impacted.”
On Tuesday, Delta, the world’s second-largest airline by several metrics, reissued a travel waiver for all passengers booked through Friday due to the ongoing weather issues in Seattle. The waiver provides customers with the fare difference to reschedule as long as they fly by Sunday, Jan. 2. An airline spokesperson also said Tuesday that Delta would be issuing travel vouchers to affected customers.
Airlines see uptick in travelers this year
Despite the travel interruptions — on top of concerns about the omicron variant spreading throughout the country — passenger counts around Christmas neared 2019 levels, according to the Transportation Security Administration.
Between Dec. 10 and Dec. 27, more than 2 million travelers passed through U.S. airport security lines on 11 of those days, TSA reported. Last year, passenger counts never reached 2 million in December, peaking at 1.28 million the day after Christmas.
The recent totals match up with November passenger totals as people become more comfortable traveling during the ongoing pandemic, even with warnings from some public health experts.
“There are just a lot of factors to take into consideration. We want people to enjoy their families, but we also don’t want any bad outcomes of that as well,” Dr. David Pate, former president and CEO of St. Luke’s Health System based in Boise, said during a coronavirus panel discussion hosted by the Statesman earlier this month.
Daily passenger counts this year surpassed 2 million in the U.S. on June 11 — the first time since March 7, 2020, as the pandemic arrived and gutted the nation’s commercial air travel industry. But traveler totals for 2021 peaked on two days in November: the day before Thanksgiving and the Sunday after. More than 2.45 million passengers passed through airport security on Sunday, Nov. 28.
Boise Airport also notched its busiest November on record this year, at more than 340,000 passengers, or about a 1% increase from its previous high for the month set in 2019. Compared with that year, total passengers are still down about 12% at the regional air hub as of Tuesday, despite setting an all-time monthly record for passengers in July, according to airport data.
But travel at Boise Airport is again busy around the year-end holidays, airport spokesperson Shawna Samuelson told the Statesman. The airport’s short- and long-term parking garage was at capacity over the weekend — a sign that traveler totals may approach the more than 370,000 people who passed through the security checkpoint in Boise during its all-time December record set in 2019.
