Vancouver International Airport (YVR) is expected to have a banner summer season and is seeing much faster growth in its number of international passengers than it is for its number of domestic ones, according to data from the Vancouver Airport Authority (VAA), which oversees the airport.
International travel was slow to return to YVR following the COVID-19 pandemic, but figures up to May show that the number of international visitors in the first five months of this year are almost at the level seen in those months in 2019, before the pandemic disrupted travel around the world.
Domestic travel, in contrast, was quick to rebound in the post-pandemic world, and hit a record-high level at YVR in 2023. In the first five months of 2024, however, growth in the number of domestic travellers at the airport has been marginal. It was up 1.9 per cent, to 4,918,280 passengers.
The airport's number of international passengers, in contrast, saw 14.9-per-cent year-over-year growth in the first five months of this year. That growth was nearly eight times that for domestic passengers, at 5,364,607 people who either boarded or disembarked aircraft at YVR.
Domestic travel even shrunk on a year-over-year basis in May: to 1,119,975 passengers, down 1.2 per cent from the 1,134,114 domestic passengers at the airport in May 2023, according to VAA data.
International passenger growth is widespread and from around the world
Americans make up the largest cohort of international passengers at YVR, at about 48 per cent, and U.S. passenger growth was up 13.2 per cent year-over-year in the first five months of this year, to 2,577,449 people.
European-passenger growth at YVR was 19.3 per cent (to 553,491 people) in the first five months of this year, compared with the same period last year. That growth has been encouraged by more routes and increased capacity on existing routes. Frankfurt-based Condor Airlines, for example, increased capacity for passengers and cargo on flights between its Frankfurt Airport (FRA) base and YVR, the airline's director of sales for North America, Mikko Turtiainen told BIV in April.
Growth in the number of passengers boarding or disembarking planes at YVR who hail from Asia-Pacific countries hit 14.1 per cent in the first five months of 2024, to 1,568,385.
The VAA anticipates 7.8 million passengers to either board or disembark planes at the airport between July 1 and September 30. That would be a 9.6-per-cent increase compared with that period in 2023, according to the VAA.
The VAA said that it expects an average of 85,196 passengers per day in that busy season, and a total of 62,387 flights.
It projects that the busiest day of that three-month stretch will be Aug. 15, when 90,886 passengers are expected. That is followed by Aug. 19 and Sept. 2, with 90,856 and 90,812 passengers expected respectively.
Historically, the busiest months at the airport are, in order: August, July and June, closely followed by September.
Statistics Canada today released its 2023 data for Canadian airport passengers, which sometimes differs from the actual airports' counts. It found that YVR in 2023 had the second-highest annual growth rate for passengers in Canada, at 30.3 per cent, after Montreal's Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport, which had 31.4-per-cent passenger growth.
