For Thanksgiving weekend this year, Lynden Pindling International Airport (LPIA) welcomed 40,284 passengers, Nassau Airport Development Company (NAD) Chief Executive Officer Vernice Walkine revealed, which was 81 percent of the number recorded in 2019 when The Bahamas recorded record visitor arrivals.
Thanksgiving is one of the busiest travel periods for Americans, with more than 42 percent taking trips for the holiday.
For comparison, there were 5,878 passenger arrivals to LPIA in 2020, during the height of COVID-19, and there were 49,766 in 2019, when tourism was booming for The Bahamas.
“We’re clearly on a path to recovery and as we get through each month of the year, you can see how close we are to getting to our 2019 passenger levels, so we are really pleased about that,” she said during a presentation to the Bahamas Hotel & Tourism Association’s 69th annual general meeting, held virtually on Friday.
“Obviously, it’s easy to compare to 2020. You can see the difference between 2019 and 2020 and, then, in 2021, we started to show some significant signs of recovery, where we ended up about 19 percent below 2019 levels. So, we’re approaching the 2019 levels and we are really very pleased about that.”
According to Walkine, a notable portion of that uptick in Thanksgiving travel was due to private aviation.
“One thing that I will flag for you is, a good indication of how our recovery is occurring is the fact that there was actually a 6.2 percent increase in aircraft movements, so we actually had more flight activity during this year’s Thanksgiving relative to 2019. That’s a good indication,” she said.
“Private aviation contributed a lot to that but, also, it was good to have some notable events occurring, the Battle for Atlantis and, of course, the Baha Mar basketball tournaments, which helped with a significant number of charter flights as well over the Thanksgiving weekend.”
In terms of overall passenger growth performance, LPIA is estimating 138,977 passengers for the month of December, which would be the highest for the entire 2021 and just 41,000 fewer than the 180,670 passengers recorded during 2019’s historic tourist arrival year.
Based on the combined total of passengers arriving to LPIA for each month of the year, the airport is set to have seen just short of one million passengers, clocking in a total of 975,704.
Travel analytics firm Forward Keys noted last month that The Bahamas is the eighth most popular destination for American travelers for Thanksgiving, based on tickets booked and tracked through.
The post Walkine: LPIA welcomed 40,284 Thanksgiving weekend visitors appeared first on The Nassau Guardian.
source https://thenassauguardian.com/walkine-lpia-welcomed-40284-thanksgiving-weekend-visitors/
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