Passenger traffic at Luis Muñoz Marín Int’l Airport up 42.9% Y-O-Y in March
Passenger movement through the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport surged by 42.9% year-over-year in March, when 751,974 people used the facility, versus the 526,181 recorded during the same month in 2020, which was significantly impacted by severe downturns in business and leisure travel stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Traffic in March 2021 benefitted from four days of the Holy Week holiday, according to Grupo Aeroportuario del Sureste (ASUR), the parent company of Aerostar, which runs the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport. Last year’s Holy Week was observed in April.
Unsurprisingly, last month’s activity at the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport showed that the majority of the passengers, or 731,836, were on domestic flights, while international passengers barely reached 20,138.
While domestic passenger traffic was up 51.9%, international activity was down 54.7%, which airport officials have attributed to the low number of flights coming from outside the United States.
Puerto Rico has less than a handful of international airlines that have resumed service — including Avianca and Copa — while others, such as Spain’s Iberia, are expected to begin flying in the summer, Aerostar CEO Jorge Fernández said last week during an episode of Dollars and Sense, a News is my Business podcast.
As for passenger traffic accrued so far this year, nearly 1.8 million people traveled through Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport from January to March, reflecting a 20% year-over-year drop for the same period in 2020, when about 2.2 million passengers used the facility.
