Boise airport sheds flights, destinations, passengers as COVID keeps travelers home
It was supposed to have been a record-breaking year for the Boise Airport.
Instead, the number of people flying through the airport fell 94% in April from April 2019. That means highly anticipated new routes are on hold, and major airport renovations aren’t happening.
And it means you may not find the flight you’ve taken in the past to leave town. Today and through at least the rest of June, Boise does not have scheduled service to Minneapolis, Spokane, Houston or Sacramento — all cities that had service before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Spokesperson Sean Briggs said that there were on average 71 scheduled departures a day in June 2019. In 2020, officials estimate that number will be 31. That would be a sharp improvement from 18 in May and a slight improvement from 29 in April.
“Airlines are making schedule adjustments quite often,” Briggs said in an email.
Data from the airport show that only 18,086 people flew through Boise in April. More than 300,000 people flew in April 2019.
Only 807,396 people traveled through the airport from January to April, down more than a third from the 1.2 million in the same period last year.
The dropoff has cut revenues to the city-run airport. A new employee parking garage slated to begin this year near the corner of Wright and Owyhee streets is shelved, and the $16 million set aside for it could instead go toward general operating expenses.
New flights that were scheduled to begin this summer — one on Delta Air Lines to Atlanta, which was set to become Boise’s easternmost direct destination, and another on Alaska Airlines to Everett, Washington — have been “indefinitely postponed.”
Boise’s numbers match those seen nationally. The Transportation Security Administration tracks the number of people who go through TSA checkpoints across the country each day, and the number of passengers flying nationally follows the same trend of a fall in March followed by a dive in April.
At the beginning of March, nearly 2 million people went through checkpoints each day. By March 31, only 146,348 people did. The low point came April 14, when just 87,534 people flew as much of the country was shut down.
The worst is over, but not by much. Nationally, year-over-year passenger numbers were down only 90% in May, compared with 95% in April.
Boise Airport’s May numbers won’t be available until the end of June.
“Passenger traffic is slowly starting to increase at the Boise Airport,” Briggs said, “but it’s still a fraction of what it once was.”
This story was originally published June 2, 2020 at 11:09 AM.
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