The addition of larger aircraft and more flights this summer is expected to help the Portland International Jetport rebound from its below-average performance in the first half of the year.
Because the airport is usually twice as busy in the summer as the winter, increased passenger counts this season will allow the jetport to make up the ground it lost because of severe weather over the winter months, said Paul Bradbury, director of the city-owned airport.
“If I have a killer August, it more than makes up for January and February,” he said.
The upcoming holiday period is expected to be a typical summer weekend for the jetport. It will be busy leading up to the Fourth of July holiday, but Saturday will be slower than usual because fewer people travel on the holiday, Bradbury said.
There are more than 24,000 additional available seats during the four-month period from June through September compared with the same period last year, reflecting bigger planes and more flights. Although not all of those seats will be filled with paying passengers, the airlines are making investments because they anticipate increased demand, he said.
In all, more than 80 flights were canceled last winter, said Bradbury. Although Portland received more than 94 inches of snow, the bigger problem was snowfall in other East Coast cities that Portland connects to, including New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and even Charlotte, North Carolina.
“Usually it has nothing to do with us,” Bradbury said. “We usually get the runways plowed.”
Passenger counts at the jetport were down only 0.2 percent in January from a year earlier, but then weather in the East got a lot worse. Passenger counts were down 5.5 percent in February, 6.1 percent in March and 2.5 percent in April.
But the arrival of good weather in May turned the trend around. There were 71,113 passengers for the month, a 2.4 percent increase over May 2014.
Bradbury said airlines are increasing capacity because more people are flying and jets are often filled, particularly in the summer. Also, the airlines are more profitable because lower fuel prices have reduced their expenses, a savings that hasn’t been passed on to consumers.
Increasingly, airlines also are charging fees for services. For example, JetBlue, which had long touted its one-free-checked-bag perk, on Tuesday started charging $25 for the first checked bag.
Five airlines serve Portland with 11 nonstop destinations. In addition, Southwest Airlines offers two seasonal flights: one to Chicago in the summer and another to Orlando, Florida, in the winter.
In the summer, about 30 percent of the passengers are Maine residents and 70 percent are from outside the state. The car rental business at the airport surges in the summer, Bradbury said.
In the winter, that ratio reverses – about 70 percent of the passengers are from Maine. The trend is reflected in parking lots that are partially empty in the summer and full in the winter.
The jetport ended its 2015 fiscal year June 30. Total passenger counts will be about 1.7 million, roughly the same as in fiscal 2014.
Total revenues during the 11-month period from July 1 to the end of May were $17.4 million, up 6.1 percent over the same period a year ago.
Despite the flat passenger counts, revenues are up because of increased sales of rental cars, food and gifts. Bradbury cited an improving economy as the reason.
“The passengers that are flying are spending more money because they have money to spend,” he said.
In April, 78 percent of the jetport’s flights arrived on time, and 84 percent departed on time, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Nationally, 82 percent of all flights departed or arrived on time in April, the most recent month for which data were available.
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