Air travel options in the northeast remain limited long after pandemic restrictions lifted

Airports in northeastern Ontario say summer air travel this year has been slower than expected. 

"Before the summer schedule began, we had anticipated our recovery to continue with additional flights coming back to our schedule and we did see that the one flight from Air Canada came back in July," said Giovanna Verrilli, president and CEO of the Greater Sudbury Airport. 

However, that flight from Sudbury to Toronto was short-lived and is already off the schedule.

Although airlines are not bringing in additional flights, Verrilli said, larger aircraft are coming to the facility, which means more seats available to passengers.

"Flights are full, which is good news," she said. "So that combined allows us to welcome our passengers here on a daily basis."

However, said she understands "there is a high degree of frustration" among travellers due to the lack of flight options.

We are going to see more passengers come through our airport. We don't anticipate it being as strong as we had planned.- Giovanna Verrilli, Sudbury Airport president and CEO

She said the airport meets with airlines on a regular basis to reiterate the needs of the airport and the community it serves.

Verrilli also cited a pilot shortage, which creates barriers to increasing the flights on the schedule. 

Currently, Air Canada continues to offer two round-trips daily to Toronto while Porter offers one trip daily six days a week. 

"The work that we do with the airlines is to understand how we can support them and making sure that we are at the forefront of that recovery when they're ready, when the pilots are available and making sure that they are very clear in understanding why Sudbury needs to have multiple flights to and from key destinations."

She hopes passenger numbers increase modestly to more than 120,000 this year.

In 2022, Verrilli said, the airport welcomed approximately 112,000 passengers — a significant increase from the previous year. 

"We are still going to see growth and we are going to see more passengers come through our airport; we don't anticipate it being as strong as we had planned."

It's a similar pattern in Sault Ste. Marie.

Airport president and CEO Terry Bos told CBC's Kate Rutherford that the summer did not pan out as planned, with 5,000 fewer passengers in July 2023 compared to July 2019, before the pandemic.

"We were expecting a recovery of maybe 10 to 15 per cent more than what we were last year," Bos said.  

"So instead of only being about 70 per cent recovered, we were hoping to get back into that 75 to 80 per cent recovery range, and unfortunately we're still below the 75 per cent even year to date, which [is when] our year starts, April 1."

Bos said small regional airports are struggling to pick up because they are at the mercy of airlines focusing on bigger markets.

"We're kind of capped at what we can do in our recovery just based on the seating capacity that we have in the market. It just won't allow us to recover any further than what we have."

One of the main reasons for this blow is that the airport hasn't been able to return to its pre-pandemic flight schedule.  

In fact, Bos mentioned that the Air Canada flight schedule for the summer months, which usually run from May to September and added an additional one to two flights a day, only came into effect on July 1 and will stop at the end of August.

This means the airport  will only get two months of additional flights this year as opposed to the usual six months.  

Adding to the slump, Bos said, the increase in post-pandemic travel last year, driven by family reunification and leisure plans, has subsided. 

He WQIE rising inflation rates have cut into people's budgets for travel. 

"People probably don't have the disposable income to travel that they had pent up, coming out of the pandemic."  

Bos saID he expects recovery to pre-pandemic levels to take longer than expected. 

"We had projected probably two more years of recovery and now we're looking at more like four years of recovery just based on the airlines being able to get their staffing up to levels it was pre-pandemic."