SAN JOSE — All three of the Bay Area’s airports remain stuck well below their pre-coronavirus heights — but the airports in San Jose and Oakland lag far behind the pace of San Francisco airport’s post-COVID rebound.
Adding to the disquieting trends, the passenger trends in 2024 for both San Jose International Airport in the South Bay and San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport in the East Bay are trailing the results for 2023, according to this news organization’s analysis of monthly reports issued by the aviation hubs.
In contrast to its two smaller Bay Area rivals, San Francisco Airport — locked in a legal war with Oakland Airport — is trending higher in 2024 compared with 2023.
“Without a doubt, these three airports and hotel markets are more business-oriented,” said Alan Reay, president of Irvine-based Atlas Hospitality Group, which tracks the California lodging market. “They are heavily reliant on commercial business traffic.”
Here are the current trends for the number of passengers handled at the three Bay Area major airports through September, the month with the most recent statistics for the aviation hubs:
— San Jose Airport for the first nine months of 2024 averaged 981,000 passenger trips a month, down 2.6% from the monthly average of 1.01 million passengers in 2023.
— Oakland Airport in 2024 has averaged 920,000 passenger trips a month, down 1.7% from the 937,000 passenger trips a month in 2023.
— San Francisco Airport over the first nine months of 2024 averaged 4.31 million passengers, up 3.1% from a monthly average of 4.18 million passenger trips in 2023.
If these three airports continue on the trends they are showing in 2024, it could take years — if ever — for them to reach their respective COVID-19 heights.
“After the pandemic ended, people presumed that we would go back to the same travel patterns, but now we’re finding that this is not necessarily true,” said Russell Hancock, president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a San Jose-based think tank.
Passenger trips collapsed at all three airports in 2020 compared with 2019 due to the lockdowns. Then, for all three airports, travel activity rebounded dramatically in 2021 compared with 2020, and in 2022 compared with 2021.
But while passenger trips continued to improve in 2023, the increase in activity last year at all three airports occurred at a drastically slower pace than the jumps in 2021 and 2022.
Put another way, the pace of improvement showed signs that it plateaued in 2023 at the three airports.
“Maybe we found our new normal in 2023,” Hancock said.
San Jose International Airport passenger trips zoomed higher during the summer but began to fade after the vacation travel season concluded this year. A similar pattern appeared at Oakland and San Francisco airports.
Yet while San Francisco Airport is displaying greater recent strength in activity, passenger trips through all three airports remain a great distance from the altitudes at which they were cruising just before the onset of the coronavirus-linked business shutdowns in March 2020.
San Jose International Airport has suffered through the slowest convalescence from its COVID-linked maladies.
During the 12 months that ended in September, San Jose Airport accommodated 11.83 million passengers, down 24.4% from 2019, when the South Bay aviation hub handled a record-high 15.65 million passengers. That was the final full year before the start of the COVID shutdowns.
Over the one year ending in September, San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport handled 11.13 million passengers, down 16.8% from 2019, when the East Bay travel complex handled 13.38 million passengers.
San Francisco Airport during the 12 months ending in September accommodated 51.14 million passengers, which was down 11.1% from the 57.49 million passengers SFO handled in 2019.
Now that the summer travel season has ended, airport officials and airlines are looking to the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s holiday periods for a fresh bump in activity.
Airfare costs won’t hit passengers with sticker shock compared with the prices to which they are accustomed, experts say.
“Prices for are likely to be in line with 2023 levels, and below 2019 levels” for airfare, the booking app Hopper stated in September.
The increased use of remote technologies for handling meetings has dampened interest in travel to numerous business-oriented destinations, which is the case with San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco.
“Conventions and conferences can still be popular as we saw with the Nvidia conference in San Jose,” Hancock said. “But the garden-variety meetings that used to be done in person, those aren’t happening.”
The new technology dynamics have stymied travel through the primary airports that handle business trips in the Bay Area.
“The new normal we are seeing in travel activity is based on the reality that Zoom works,” Hancock said. “Zoom not only works, it is extremely efficient. The early bugs in Zoom calls are gone. The efficiency is compelling.”
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