The growth in U.S. airport passenger traffic to start 2024 suggests a continued recovery in business travel, according to CoStar's Daryl Cronk.
As CoStar's director of hospitality analytics for the southeastern U.S., Cronk said in an email interview that airline passenger data recorded by the Transportation Security Administration shows an increase in volume in the early months of 2024, surpassing 2023 levels as well as pre-pandemic volumes.
Volume in January and February 2024 was 6% higher than 2023 and 5% above the first two months of 2019.
Passenger traffic from Christmas Eve through New Year's Day rose 15% year over year and was 1% above the 2019 holiday season, indicating leisure travel remained strong at the end of 2023, he added.
"Travel in January and February heavily depends on travel for business purposes and to attend a convention or group meeting, while leisure travel enters a relatively slow period between the recent holiday season and the upcoming spring breaks. The growth in airport passenger traffic to start 2024 suggests business travel continues to recover from the effects of the pandemic," Cronk said.
Over Super Bowl weekend, Las Vegas hotels achieved the highest weekend average daily rate ever in the continental U.S., excluding Hawaii.
This went hand in hand with strong demand at U.S. airports, said Jan Freitag, CoStar's national director for hospitality market analytics.
It's also worth noting that a lot of air traffic came from private planes, which is not picked up in the TSA data.
"We expect spring break travel to boost TSA numbers and hotel demand during March as schools let out, but the lack of reliable snow cover will likely mean fewer travelers to head out west for one last skiing vacation. We are monitoring the demand for hotels on the Florida beaches to see if restrictive city ordinances are putting a dent in the otherwise robust spring break demand," Freitag said via email.
Cronk added that the industry will be watching to see if leisure travelers "continue to take to the skies while shrugging off the effects of inflation and higher industry rates."