Edmonton airport sees doubling of passengers between 2021 and 2022: preliminary report

By Stephanie Swensrude 630CHED

Posted January 25, 2023 12:39 pm

Updated January 25, 2023 3:22 pm

A traveller carrying luggage into the Edmonton International Airport on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021. Passenger numbers doubled at YEG between 2021 and 2022. Jason Franson, The Canadian Press

There was a big jump in passenger numbers at Edmonton International Airport (YEG) last year compared with 2021.

A preliminary report shows that in 2022, more than 5.8 million passengers arrived at or departed from the airport, up from nearly 2.8 million in 2021.

Despite the big increase, it’s not quite up to the record-setting 8.1 million passengers reported in 2019.

The category with the largest increase was flights between the U.S. and Canada — those numbers are up 775 per cent. Fewer than 50,000 passengers travelled between the two countries through YEG in 2021, while in 2022 almost 430,000 did.

International flights are also up, with nearly 275,000 passengers arriving or departing from the airport in 2022, an increase of more than 350 per cent.

Domestic flights saw a relatively modest doubling between the two years, with 2.2 million flights in 2021 and 4.7 million in 2022.

This all happened, of course, as border restrictions and travel mandates gradually dropped throughout 2022. Also, international flights through YEG were only allowed in the last five months of 2021, which helps explain the leap.

New flights coming to YEG this year include a non-stop flight to Frankfurt, Germany, operated by Condor, and a new Toronto-Edmonton route through “high-value economy” airline Porter.

A YEG spokesperson told Global News the airport hopes to release a final report with officially confirmed numbers in the near future.