Local airport’s bus travelers boost passenger departures

More than 11,000 passengers boarded buses from the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport to catch flights in Philadelphia last year.

The departures contributed substantially to a promising year-long increase in the airport’s passenger boardings in 2024.

In all, the airport had 235,571 passenger departures in 2024, up 30.9% from 2023. That’s about 80% of the record 296,632 in 2019, but also more than twice as many as the 110,834 in 2020.

The bus trips to Philadelphia International Airport, run by Landline Co. for American Airlines, began Aug. 6 as a way of further connecting to major hubs. Eric McKitish, the local airport’s director of marketing, communications and air service development, said 11,288 passengers rode the buses by the end of 2024. The bus trips count as air travel departures so that’s 4.8% of all airport departures in less than half a year. The airport’s jet flights connect to airline hubs in Chicago, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C.

In all, people traveled by bus back and forth between the two airports 23,073 times, McKitish said. Many have flown out of the airport anyway, he said, “but some of them, a majority of them, are using the service.”

In December, the airport counted 2,234 bus trips among 23,800 departures. That helped set a monthly departure record for the first time since February 2020, the month before the COVID-19 pandemic began. The previous December record was 23,446 passengers in 2019.

In December 2023, only 14,437 passengers flew out of the airport, which means the record month represents a 64.9% increase.

Potentially, the strong December total could signal a record 2025, airport executive director Carl Beardsley Jr. said.

“We’re hopeful, yeah,” Beardsley said. “I think what you bring up could possibly happen, and we’re going to keep close tabs on it.”

Much of the growth arrived because of Breeze Airways. Jan. 30 marked the one-year anniversary of the budget airline’s first flight from the airport, which initiated its Orlando, Florida service.

Breeze later doubled the number of Orlando flights to four and added service to two other Florida cities, Fort Myers and Tampa, and to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

The Breeze flights added 25,619 of the approximately 55,000-passenger overall increase last year, but one of the airport’s other two airlines contributed heavily to the improvement, too.

American Airlines jets carried 151,611 passengers, up from 119,787 in 2023, an increase of 31,824 or 26.6%.

United Airlines ridership slightly declined to 56,832 from 57,540, or 1.2%.

The number of charter passengers also declined to 1,689 from 2,770, a 39 percent drop. Many of the airport’s 2023 charters were Florida flights.

In June 2019, the airport’s long-term plan, developed before the pandemic upended air travel, projected the possibility of 335,000 departures by 2035.

Back then, Beardsley sounded certain that could happen, though he sounds less certain now.

“It’s always a possibility,” he said Thursday. “As I mentioned before, we have a strong partnership with Breeze. We have a strong partnership with American and United. It might not be Breeze (expanding service). It might be new service provided by American Airlines. I like to make sure that we have, that we have strong relationships with the other carriers. Not just Breeze.”