Detroit Metro Airport was Busier Last Year than in 2020. It has a Way to Go to Match Pre-COVID Levels
Feb. 8—Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport saw a 67% jump in the number of passengers flying through there from 2020 to 2021, but the numbers still were down 36% from pre-pandemic levels.
The number of passengers flying through Detroit Metro Airport in 2021 was 23.6 million, according to data from the airport authority, which operates Detroit Metro. That's up from 2020, when about 14.1 million people flew through the airport, marking the worst year of travel at the airport since 1984. In 2019, nearly 36.8 million people flew through there.
Airport officials are "optimistic" the upward trend in travel will continue into 2022, Erica Donerson, spokesperson for the Wayne County Airport Authority, told The Detroit News. They predict Detroit Metro will serve 31 million passengers this year,
"This is a 15% decrease from 2019, which was a record year for DTW, but it does represent a 32% increase from 2021," she said in a statement.
Detroit's passenger traffic has largely matched what's happening across the country, according to Transportation Security Administration data. Across the U.S., TSA reported nearly 580 million travelers passed through its checkpoints in 2021, a nearly 80% increase from 2020. But that number, too, is still down more than 31% from 2019.
Demand for domestic leisure travel helped the airline industry and airports recover throughout 2021 even though COVID-19 variants stifled some travel. Experts expect the recovery to continue into 2022.
"The theme of 2021 was a pretty resilient recovery in domestic leisure travel, while international travel kind of remains depressed relative to 2019 levels," Morningstar aviation analyst Burkett Huey said.
"Really what's important is over the next five years that these companies can get back to 2019 levels of travel and grow from there," he added. "I forecast out five years, but I'm really thinking probably within the next two years ... I'm expecting pretty much in all my cases that we're going to get back to 2019 levels."
The recovery being underpinned primarily by domestic leisure travel is consistent with what JoAnne Verboom, owner of Travel by Gagnon in Grand Rapids and president of the Great Lakes chapter of the American Society of Travel Agents, has seen with her business. She believes many travelers are hesitant to fly internationally because of a requirement that they produce a negative COVID-19 test within a day of boarding a flight back to the U.S.
Spring break historically has been the busiest travel period for Michigan in her decades as a travel agent, Verboom said, and while she's booking spring break trips at a higher rate than earlier on in the pandemic, it's still not back to pre-pandemic levels. She's seeing clients plan domestic trips and an uptick in interest in all-inclusive resorts in Mexico and the Dominican Republican, which she attributes to more lax testing and vaccination requirements compared to other destinations.
And although travel has ticked back up since the early days of 2020 when her agency was scrambling to cancel spring break trips, Verboom isn't optimistic about a full recovery unless significantly more people get vaccinated. In Michigan, 65.4% of the state had a first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine as of Feb. 6.
Verboom's advice to anyone traveling now is to keep a close eye on COVID-19 restrictions at your destination and any venues you plan to visit, because they change frequently: "For people thinking, 'Oh I'll just stay in the U.S. and not have to worry about those things,' they'll have a much more fun and accessible vacation if they're fully vaccinated."
At some points in 2021, domestic travel did hit pre-pandemic levels and above, Huey noted, but then with "the delta variant, and then the omicron variant, travel dipped below 2019 levels again."
When business travel fully recovers is the question since many professional meet-ups have been switched to virtual exchanges.Huey predicts a permanent 10% to 20% cut to business travel in the U.S. from pre-pandemic levels, but he says there has been a "steady uptick" in such trips.
"As more people are vaccinated and COVID gets to become a more accepted part of society ... people are going to have to do it," he said. "I'm pretty confident that people are going to be selling things in person at some point."
Delta Air Lines Inc., which uses Detroit Metro as a hub, and its connection carriers saw a 20% increase in landings and take-offs at the airport from 2020 to 2021. But Delta's operations were still 27% below 2019's, according to airport data. Delta reported a profit of $280 million in 2021, down 94% from 2019.
"2021 was a year like no other for Delta, with significant progress in our recovery supported by growing brand preference, enabling us to be the only major U.S. airline to deliver profitability across the second half of the year," said Ed Bastian, Delta's chief executive officer in the company's Jan. 13 earnings release.
In the earnings report, Delta executives did warn that the omicron variant is affecting demand and will cause losses in January and February.
"Despite expectations for a loss in the March quarter, we remain positioned to generate a healthy profit in the June, September and December quarters, resulting in a meaningful profit in 2022," said Dan Janki, Delta's chief financial officer, in the release.
As for Detroit Metro, it saw the number of passengers in November and December more than double from 2020 to 2021. But last year's counts for those two months were still down a combined 23.49% from 2019.
A report produced by the University of Michigan-Dearborn in January 2014 estimated the economic impact of DTW at $10.2 billion across the state, the airport authority notes on its website.
Detroit Metro Airport's gradual recovery "reflects what we're seeing in the broader economy," said Gabe Ehrlich, a UM economist. "It's not clear to me that we're going to get back to normal, if by 'normal' we mean the way things were done before the pandemic."
Travel is a prime example of that, he noted, because would-be business travelers have grown so comfortable shifting to virtual meetings.
Overall, UM's economic forecasters expect Michigan's employment levels to recover fully by early 2024.
"But when you look at what we call lower-education services industries ... we don't see those industries making a full recovery even by the end of 2024 here in Michigan, and part of the reason is precisely these trends in things like the airport and business travel," said Ehrlich. UM economists expect travel to eventually rebound, but they also expect remote work to linger well after the pandemic ends, with broad implications for the economy.
"It really scrambles the previous pattern of activity, and some of that's going to be persistent," said Ehrlich. "So for our outlook, we do think it's going to take time for certain parts of the economy to recover, and I think that's part of what you're seeing with the airport."
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