The internet has made every passenger their own travel agent. Whether you’re booking flights to Moncton or Melbourne, you can customize the pulldown menus to suit your preferences: what’s your budget? What time of day is most convenient? How many connections? And how will your chosen airport affect your experience?
Passengers may not linger long on that last question. But perhaps they should. Airport people spend their working lives studying where people fly from and why. And over the past few years, the answers have changed dramatically. As passenger demands and demographics evolve, airports are adapting on the fly.
What are the new trends? Since the pandemic, Canadians and global travellers are going new places for new reasons and their expectations have changed accordingly. They still want their travel to be affordable, convenient, connected. And above all, they want their airports to facilitate a joyful experience or be destinations in their own right. They’re travelling to experience awe, to soak in nostalgia, to make family memories.
Demand is still growing. Global air traffic has resumed its pre-pandemic growth curve, and Canada’s top airports are seeing similar trends. But the growth isn’t even—the rebounds are smaller and more tenuous at small airports, bigger and more sustained at the large hubs. At Montreal-Trudeau, for example, passenger volume is up 12 percent over 2019, whereas many smaller regional airports have only recovered to 60 or 70 percent.
Why? Because business travel is down and leisure and “bleisure” travel are up. Fewer of us are flying for a meeting that could be accomplished quickly and cheaply with a Teams call. We’re more likely to save that budget for a conference or high-value overseas business trip, paired with a few days of personal time, to a destination with sun or fun. At Canada’s top hubs, traffic has shifted away from east-west domestic travel to north-south flights and international.
The decline in short-hop business travel comes against a background of post-pandemic pilot shortages and labour gaps. This combination has led airlines to fly fewer flights on larger planes. So people are taking off and landing in clumps, especially at the hub airports. That means longer lines for security and customs and larger baggage loads to handle.
But our passengers want better experiences, not worse, and their expectations are only getting higher. Travellers, especially younger travellers, want faster connections, shorter lines, quicker check-in. They want better retail options, more lively experiences, better architecture, more accessible terminals, more lounges, more premium seats. They want fewer hassles, more joy.
For big airports, these trends are a call to action.
To cater to their passengers’ new whims, they’re pursuing new carriers and routes. That’s why we’ve been seeing new airlines like ITA (Italy), Arajet (Dominican Republic), Royal Air Maroc and Qatar Airways touching down on Canadian runways in recent months.
They’re infusing their terminals with dining options, retail outlets and interactive events that make passengers happier to be there. Airport dining is evolving from bland to grand, featuring celebrity chefs, prix fixe dining, local flavours, and niche breweries. Calgary’s airport has an in-house spa. Toronto Pearson recently announced that it would greet travelling Taylor Swift fans with an interactive digital dance wall.
They’re also digitalizing their services with queue apps and hacks, and working with airline and agency partners to become more efficient and passenger-friendly. Vancouver uses a digital twin to visualize and monitor its facilities and systems, with the goal of centralizing operational data on one central platform. Toronto Pearson uses AI for predictive maintenance of its baggage systems and to help airlines turn their flights around faster at the gate.
Some are working with Air Canada on pilot programs to enable biometric boarding. Some are helping CATSA install CT scanners to let passengers keep liquids and laptops in their carry-on. All are looking for ways to analyze, use, and share previously siloed data to make check-in faster, improve baggage handling, shorten agency processing lines and make it easier for passengers to get through security—without compromising safety.
There is more work to be done, though, and it all goes back to the kind of experience passengers want. If they’re flying through a big hub, they want it to be connected and capacious, modern, and full of amenities. They rave about airports like Singapore’s Changi and Qatar’s Hamad International, and New York’s recently renovated LaGuardia, which leapt from worst to first in the recent industry-standard Airport Service Quality rankings. “LaGuardia has become an unexpected hero for American infrastructural renewal. It is an incredible airport,” Ian Bogost raved in the Atlantic.
Of course, that kind of joy requires investment. Two of Canada’s three largest hubs—Montreal-Trudeau and Toronto Pearson—have announced significant renewal projects this year.
Toronto Pearson, which competes with the big northeastern U.S. airports like New York’s JFK and Chicago’s O’Hare for international connections, is particularly ready for a makeover. Pearson has recovered since the pandemic restart, but its traffic is pushing its pre-pandemic peak of 50 million annual passengers and is forecast to increase to 65 million by the early 2030s. It needs the ability to maximize its domestic and international route capacity: new gates, more terminal space, more cargo capacity. It needs modern, flexible digital infrastructure that’s capable of accommodating the new technologies its passengers and partners demand.
None of that comes in a pulldown menu, but people who have a good experience in an airport have a way of coming back. The trends say passenger experience matters more than ever—and airports are taking note.
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