VIA breaks 40,000-passenger mark again in April

HARLINGEN — Valley International Airport hit 40,000 passenger enplanements for the second straight month in April, buoyed by additional flights from multiple airlines.

The 40,355 passengers who boarded outbound planes at VIA was an 80.6 percent increase from April of last year, with Southwest Airlines contributing more than half of that number.

“The last two months were unbelievable,” Marv Esterly, director of aviation at VIA, told the airport board last week. “We haven’t seen numbers like in March, and also April now, since 2008.

“Our total enplanements for April were also over 40,000 and actually beat March by a couple hundred with one less day, so that’s a really good indication what we’ve been doing with marketing and everything else in trying to service the entire Rio Grande Valley.”

The surge in seats in the Harlingen market was buoyed on March 10 when Southwest increased its flights to and from VIA from four per day to seven per day. Next month, Southwest plans to add an eighth daily flight.

But Southwest, which saw enplanements increase by 129.9 percent from last April, wasn’t alone. Frontier Airlines added flights to and from Orlando and Las Vegas, and was up 294.6 percent year-over-year with 1,724 enplanements in April.

American Airlines, which is using larger aircraft, boarded 8,698 passengers at VIA in April, an increase of 48.5 percent from last year.

And Minneapolis-based Sun Country Airlines, which will add a new nonstop flight to Cancun on June 1, had 3,168 enplanements, up 24.3 percent over last year.

With so many more seats in the market, Esterly admitted officials at the airport were concerned about whether the planes would be close to full when they took off.

The percentage of seats filled in a plane is known as its load factor. And despite an increase in seats of around 80 percent in the market, planes have been filling up as passenger demand has been high.

“Nico (Nico Mirman, director of air services and business development), was very concerned about getting them all at once but those concerns really went away when we saw the last couple of months,” Esterly said. “So Southwest knew something that we didn’t know, I guess.”

Despite the huge increase in the number of seats available, Southwest posted a load factor of 92 percent in April.

Other airlines, too, are filling their outbound seats.

United Airlines had a load factor of 88 percent, Sun Country was at 95 percent, Frontier was at 72 percent and American was at 96 percent.

For some perspective on the issue, between 2004 and 2021 the average load factor per flight for U.S. passenger routes was 74 percent. To break even, an airline has to generate a load factor of around 65 percent.

The 40,000-plus enplanements for April marks the second straight month Valley International has boasted more passengers than McAllen-Miller International Airport, which has always been the busiest airport in the Valley.

For the past two months, Harlingen has had more available seats in the market than McAllen, although Esterly says the Winter Texan factor that favors VIA normally ebbs in the summer and McAllen is usually stronger.

“It’s going to be a pretty good battle through this year,” he said.