St. Louis Lambert International Airport (STL) officials say the airport has recorded 34 straight months of passenger growth.
An American Airlines plane at St. Louis Lambert International Airport in early July 2018 (photo courtesy of airport website)
Lambert spokesman Jeff Lea says it’s a great trend, adding that the summer travel season is also increasing passenger traffic.
“We just released our second quarter statistics ending in June and had our biggest month for 2018,” Lea says. “And with the first six months of this year, we’ve surpassed serving seven-and-a-half million passengers.”
That’s an increase of more than 400,000 passengers from a year ago.
Lea says St. Louis has seen a “great run” of additional flights from Dallas-based Southwest Airlines.
“They’ve strategically been moving some of their flights out of (Chicago) Midway and into St. Louis so that the connecting traffic is not having to go through their Chicago airport but rather through St. Louis,” says Lea.
Southwest launched service to both Sacramento and San Jose in April, and Lea says Southwest will begin new non-stop service to Hartford in August.
St. Louis Lambert International Airport tower (2017 file photo courtesy of airport)
Minnesota-based Sun Country Airlines will launch service at STL this fall.
Lea says Sun Country will start flying to Fort Myers, Florida in October and to Tampa in November.
“Sun Country will be our 11th scheduled passenger air carrier,” Lea says. “We’re excited to see them. Some folks in the area may have flown them as a charter carrier going to a vacation destination with a hotel package to the Caribbean or Mexico.”
Lambert officials say June has been the busiest travel month so far in 2018, with about 1.5 million passengers.
June marked the end of St. Louis’ fiscal year, and Lea notes Lambert saw an increase of 774,000 passengers over fiscal year 2017.
Lea also tells Missourinet about 4,000 people have traveled from Lambert to Iceland on WOW Air, since the international service began in May.
Lambert officials announced in April that they’ve finished a checkpoint expansion project that creates a seventh security screening lane that will be used during peak hours in terminal two.
Click here to listen to the full interview between Missourinet’s Brian Hauswirth and St. Louis Lambert International Airport (STL) spokesman Jeff Lea, which was recorded on July 25, 2018:
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