Air travel industry not fully recovered since pandemic: StatsCan

Winnipeg Richardson International Airport

New numbers from Statistics Canada show that the air travel industry has not fully bounced back since the pandemic.

On Friday, the government agency released the latest data regarding air passenger traffic from 2018 to 2022. These numbers show that more than 117 million passengers boarded and disembarked planes at Canadian airports last year.

Although this is a major increase from 2020 and 2021, when Canadian airports saw about 46 million passengers, it still remains well below 2019 levels when there were more than 162 million passengers.

According to numbers from the Winnipeg Airports Authority (WAA), just over three million passengers arrived and departed in 2022, which is down from the nearly 4.5 million passengers it saw in 2018 and 2019.

“We’re thrilled to see how we’re continuing to move forward from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Michel Rosset, manager of communications for the WAA.

“We always predicted it would take a few years for us to fully recover and return to those same passenger volumes we saw back in 2019.”

In the first three months of this year, more than 900,000 people passed through the gates at the Winnipeg airport. This is up 112 per cent compared to the previous year and brings the airport within 80 per cent of its pre-pandemic traffic total.

“The first quarter of this year has been super promising,” Rosset said.

“Of course, spring break was a super busy time of year at the airport as people took off to those destinations for a week or so,”

Rosset said the WAA predicts that the Winnipeg airport will be back to its pre-pandemic levels as early as 2024.

The WAA is releasing its second quarter statistics for 2023 later this week.

- With files from CTV’s Daniel Halmarson.