David Crowder at the El Paso Inc. reports this week that airline passenger traffic has dropped twenty percent over the last ten years.
Since 2006, El Paso International Airport has lost the equivalent of of the city’s population that year — 600,000 — in terms of the number of airline passengers who arrived and departed.
That year, airlines carried 3.4 million passengers to and from El Paso. By last year, the number had fallen by almost 625,000 passengers according to the airport’s statistics, to 2.8 million.
But don’t worry.
“We have lost a lot of seats, but a lot of communities have lost more,” said Jeff Schultes, the airport’s assistant director.
So don’t be such a Debbie Downer. At least you’re not in a civil war, like those people in Syria. You don’t know how good you’ve got it.
El Paso’s hotels, particularly those near the airport, look at those numbers and worry.
“This scares the hell out of me,” said Rick LaFleur, general manager of the 273-room Airport Wyndham Hotel and president of the El Paso Hotel-Motel Association.
But hey. It’s all good.
This was part of the El Paso Inc story…..
Schultes acknowledges that El Paso has seen a steady and troubling decrease in passenger traffic but emphasizes that many other cities have too.
“We actually lost less than Tucson,” he said.
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this is from the az daily star in tucson in yesterday’s paper.July 27, 2015 12:24 pm • Arizona Daily Star
United Airlines will add a daily nonstop flight from Tucson to Chicago O’Hare International Airport from Dec. 17 through April 4, Tucson International Airport said Monday.
Tickets are now available for purchase on the flights, which will be operated as United Express by SkyWest Airlines using Embraer E175 regional jets.
Currently, only American Airlines offers nonstop service from Tucson to Chicago O’Hare, while Southwest and Delta offer nonstop service to Chicago Midway.
United last flew nonstop between Tucson and O’Hare from 2000 to 2004.
In another positive schedule change, the airport said United also will use a larger, 128-passenger Airbus A319 on one of its existing four, daily round-trips from Tucson to Denver, starting Oct. 25.
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ELP airport management is a joke. Spending all that money on a parking garage in a city with zero weather issues and a dying airport? Tucson has far superior air service compared to ELP. Not to mention the extra DEN and ORD service in Tucson they also picked up a new non stop to Portland that started recently. When was the last time ELP got new service to anywhere?
-brownfield