SAN JOSE — Passenger trips through San Jose International Airport lost altitude in August in a sign of weakness for the summer travel season, a new report shows.
San Jose International Airport handled 1.07 million passengers in August, a drop from the July totals and lower than the trip activity during the same month the year before.
Passenger activity in August for San Jose Airport was down 2.1% compared with August 2024 and a decline of 2.6% compared with July, the prior month.
The figures suggest the South Bay aviation hub continues to struggle to regain the altitude it once enjoyed before the coronavirus outbreak.
The latest statistics also indicate the airport may have reached its cruising altitude for passenger trips and may have trouble climbing much higher.
The big problem? Experts say business travel has yet to recover from where it was before the coronavirus outbreak due to the prevalence of technologies for remote meetings such as ubiquitous Zoom calls or Google Meet and Chat.
Fading business travel activity has hurt markets that depend on such trips. The Bay Area is such a market, including the tech-oriented South Bay.
The South Bay does attract some leisure travelers, especially those who seek a convenient jump-off point for Monterey Bay or other Bay Area locations.
Other ways of measuring San Jose Airport activity provide stark evidence of the current struggles for San Jose Airport compared with 2019, the final full year before government-mandated business shutdowns to combat the spread of the coronavirus.
Over the 12 months that ended in August, San Jose International Airport handled 11.87 million passengers. That’s down 24.2% from the record-high 15.65 million passengers the airport accommodated in 2019.
Ominously, the current one-year trend for San Jose air travel activity is hinting that 2024 could be a weaker year than 2023, when the airport handled 12.1 million passengers.
If a decline occurs for all of 2024, that would snap three straight years of rising San Jose Airport activity after the collapse in passenger trips in 2020 as a result of the meltdown of the worldwide travel and hotel markets.
However, the busy Thanksgiving weekend could boost San Jose Airport’s numbers for November and the Christmas and New Year’s travel periods could fuel a jump in trips for December.
Plus, new flights by airlines could elevate San Jose’s passenger activity.
During the summer, Frontier Airlines resumed service at San Jose with daily nonstop flights that connect the South Bay with Denver, San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix.