Airport Traffic Still Rising Since Pandemic

Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport. Image from the airport.

Passenger air traffic through Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport has been steadily returning since the COVID-19 pandemic grounded plans all over the world and sent commercial air travel plummeting.

Traffic through Milwaukee Mitchell bottomed out in April 2020 when fewer than 25,000 passengers traveled through the airport. In the months and years since then it has been a generally steady climb upward.

Passenger traffic in 2022 improved upon 2021, and while it appears 2023 is on track to beat last year’s numbers, the airport will need gangbuster traffic the rest of the year to catch up to pre-pandemic passenger traffic. The last year without the COVID-19 pandemic, 2019, saw approximately 6.8 million passengers travel through the airport.

The summer months are typically some of the busiest for commercial air travel. But in recent years, for Milwaukee Mitchell at least, March has also proven a popular time to travel.

In 2018, the best year in the past decade for passenger traffic through Milwaukee Mitchell, the airport had nearly 700,000 passengers travel through the airport in March. In 2022, traffic that month had returned to approximately 533,000, and it held steady this year at approximately 520,000 passengers through the airport.

But June has proven a very good month for growth these past two years. In 2022, the airport saw an 49% increase in passenger traffic that month compared to 2021. And this year, another 10% increase compared to last year. As of June, the passenger traffic at the airport is ahead of 2022 by approximately 128,000 passengers.

And October is still to come. Since the pandemic, it has proven another busy month for the airport. In both 2022 and 2021, it was the second-highest month for passenger traffic. Whereas in both 2018 and 2019, it was only the sixth-highest month for traffic.

The airport has for several years been attempting to persuade local travelers to use Milwaukee’s airport. In 2019 it launched a marketing campaign to this effect.

Milwaukee Mitchell has been adding new amenities and travel services, while pointing out that other nearby airports, like Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, do not offer these same services.

“In the end, our message to the community is this: The more we all choose to fly from MKE, the easier it is for airlines to add service from Milwaukee,” said airport spokesperson Harold Mester “Flying from other airports hampers our ability to get more flights and nonstop destinations.”

Recently, American Airlines announced daily flights between Milwaukee and Miami that will open up a host of Caribbean and Latin American destinations to local travelers.