How The Halifax Airport Will Recover From Covid-19
HALIFAX — The president and CEO of Halifax Stanfield International Airport says business is starting to come back to the airport—but that it will be years before it completely recovers.
However, she and her team have a plan to help that recovery along, and it involves more than just luring back passengers.
This week, Joyce Carter gave the keynote address at the Sackville Business Association’s Thrive Business Growth Conference.
She used the opportunity to give some great advice and reflect on keeping the airport, and her team, running during the pandemic.
But she was also candid about the past and current state of Halifax’s airport, and how she and her team plan to help it recover.
Recovery Has Started, But There’s A Long Way To Go
Before the pandemic, Halifax Stanfield International Airport was one of the busiest in Canada. Seventeen airlines offered 200 flights a day into and out of Halifax. In 2019, 4.2 million airline passengers passed through the city.
But when Covid-19 hit, passengers evaporated and airlines axed huge swaths of their flights.
At its slowest, there were only 3 airlines operating at Stanfield, offering nine flights a week to four Canadian cities. In 2020, the airport served fewer than 1 million passengers.
“Almost overnight we lost 50 years of growth,” Carter said.
Things are better now, but still far from where they were.
In Halifax, eight airlines are running 60-70 flights to 15 destinations. But as of last month, there was still only half as much traffic as there was in 2019.
“Twenty-twenty-one will still be a very tough year for us, as will 2022,” Carter said. “We certainly have a long way to go.”
She said it won’t be until 2024, “or likely 2025, 2026” before business is back to pre-pandemic levels. Even then, things will probably never go all the way back to the way they were.
“I really do believe there’s no ‘back to normal.’ We certainly will not be the same post-Covid that we were pre-Covid,” she said.
Is Cargo Traffic The Key?
Carter said the big questions now for the Halifax airport are how will they bring traffic back to the airport, and what will they do until it returns?
Airports are not funded by the government: they make most of their money through the fees they charge passengers and airlines.
Carter said Stanfield would need to get back to about 70 percent of its pre-Covid traffic just to break even. Since that’s not happening soon, they must find ways to adapt.
“Covid has created an opportunity for us to be creative and to be diverse. Our previous strategies, although we considered them to be successful…were heavily, heavily reliant on passengers. And given our current situation, of course, we must alter our course,” she said.
One of their first pivots was to focus more on cargo traffic.
Before the pandemic, Carter said cargo traffic accounted for just three percent of the airport’s revenue.
But cargo traffic has come back much faster than passengers—especially as online shopping has exploded during the pandemic—and it has the potential to be good business for Halifax.
Over the last 18 months, even though it was bleeding money, Stanfield pushed ahead with the construction of a new air cargo logistics park.
“It was a strategic decision we made, despite our significant financial losses, to continue with the development of this facility because we knew that cargo was going to help get us out of the pandemic,” Carter explained.
She said construction on the park is now finished, and it’s fully leased by two tenants. It will likely open in early 2022.
Land, New Passengers, And Bringing Back Flights
The airport is also looking at ways to capitalize on its vast tracts of land. A lot of that land doesn’t need to be used for direct airport operations and, because it’s close to highway access and millions of air passengers, there’s enormous development potential.
Finally, Carter says the airport is evolving to meet the new needs of its passengers.
Travelling is more stressful for many than it has been in the past, and she says the airport needs to be aware of that.
They’ve created initiatives, and invested in technology, to make the airport cleaner and safer—and worked on ways to tell passengers about them.
Most airport travelers right now are what she calls “sun lounge tourists.” They’re generally older than 55, travelling for leisure, and are most concerned about “safety, speed, comfort, and cleanliness.”
“We don’t see a lot of suits in our airport right now,” she said, “so we know that we have to focus our initiatives a little differently than we did in the past.”
Carter said tourism travel will always be important for Halifax, so she and her team will also work hard to bring more routes back to Stanfield.
“We know that tourism is only going to grow through direct services: you don’t want to go to Glasgow by flying over Toronto and Montreal. We saw our growth when we had our international service, so we have to build that back, no question,” she said.
Trevor Nichols is a Huddle reporter in Halifax. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].