Airport Expected To Match Pre-Pandemic Traffic By 2025

Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport. Image from the airport.

Officials at Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport expect passenger traffic to return to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2025.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in 2020 air travel plummeted. Passenger traffic through Milwaukee Mitchell dropped 62% in 2020 from the previous year. Since then, Milwaukee, and airports around the country have watched passenger traffic slowly crawl back.

Traffic has increased year over year since 2020 and based on the current rate of growth, officials expect 2025 to finally catch up to pre-pandemic traffic, potentially even eclipsing the numbers recorded in 2019, according to the airport’s budget narrative in Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley‘s 2025 recommended budget. The projection was built using passenger data from the beginning of the year and traffic growth industrywide.

Even though carriers have not expanded destinations and flight offerings to what was available before the pandemic, traffic is improving.

“On the supply side, airlines have not yet returned to serving the number of destinations or frequencies flown pre-pandemic for all U.S. airports,” the airport said. “Nationally, airlines have cited factors such as staffing and equipment shortages due to older aircraft retirement and delays in delivery of newly ordered aircraft.”

Monthly passenger data for 2024 suggests the airport will finish the year behind pre-pandemic traffic in 2019, but only slightly: it’s projected to come within 5% of 2019 traffic by the end of the year. A global cyber outage in July delayed and canceled flights across the U.S., but the airport still finished the month with more passenger traffic than July 2023.

In August, the airport received its passenger data for the first six months of the year and announced that traffic was more than 10% higher than 2023. March was the airport’s busiest month, with carriers stacking flights for spring break travelers.

“We’re very pleased with the increase we’re seeing so far this year,” Airport Director Brian Dranzik said in a statement at the time. “This additional flight activity helps create more jobs and supports our local economy.”

Before the pandemic hit, the airport launched a marketing campaign aimed at convincing more travelers living in the Milwaukee area to fly out of Milwaukee Mitchell rather than using Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Airlines pay attention to where the demand is. The idea is, if more more travelers are using the Milwaukee airport, they will take note and add more flights or destinations.

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