Delta Airlines is suspending service to Peoria International Airport as part of a larger scaling-back of operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those who wish to fly the airline locally will have to drive over to Bloomington-Normal.
PIA Director Gene Olson said this is something they’ve seen coming for a while.
“Delta, like many other airlines, accepted dollars from the federal government in the form of a CARES Act grant. To get the money, they had to keep serving the points they were already serving,” Olson said. “Delta had petitioned the (U.S.Department of Transportation) earlier, in the name of safety to reduce exposure to COVID-19 … they wanted to consolidate service at airports where they had two airports within 60 miles of each other.”
Delta proposed closing Peoria and serve those passengers out of Bloomington-Normal. Olson said the DOT never made a final decision on the petition, but within weeks of Delta’s filing, the agency made a preliminary rule change allowing airlines to suspend service at 5% of their markets or five airports, whichever was bigger.
That meant Delta—as well as United and American—could suspend service at 11 points. Olson said Delta flights are not expected to resume in Peoria until after Sept. 30.
It’s not all bad news, he said, noting no other airline petitioned to suspend service in Peoria.
“All three of the other airlines that serve Peoria did identify points that they wanted to suspend service to, but none of them identified Peoria,” he said.
That means Allegiant, American, and United Airlines will continue to fly out of PIA, although the number of flights and passenger volumes remain low.
Olson said despite losing Delta for the time being, he doesn’t expect to lose too many Peoria-area passengers to Central Illinois Regional Airport (CIRA) in Bloomington-Normal.
“I don’t believe too many people—if they’re choosing to fly locally, especially in this day and age—I don’t expect they will drive over to Bloomington to get on a plane. If they’re going to not fly out of Peoria, they’re probably going to fly out of Chicago.”
CIRA Diretor Carl Olson, who is not related to Gene Olson at PIA, disagreed, arguing a lot of travelers will want to skip the more than three-hour drive time it takes to get to Chicago. Plus, he said, CIRA offers free parking those larger airports do not.
“With our still having daily flights on Delta to Atlanta, we are hopeful that we’ll be able to attract some of those travelers over here from Peoria right away,” said Carl Olson.
Both PIA and CIRA are seeing a slow uptick in people looking to fly, after nearly three months of cancelled trips and empty planes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gene Olson said PIA hit a low point in mid-April, but now the airport is seeing relatively steady growth.
“We were at between 11% and 14% load factor, which is the percent of available seats that are occupied,” he said. “We’re probably up in the 30% range now, but that is on a drastically decreased number of flights.”
CIRA passenger counts had dropped 97% when the pandemic took hold. Carl Olson said that’s comparable to national declines.
“Looking at TSA figures nationwide for this past week, traffic was up to 12% of what it was a year ago. So, it is slowly kicking up,” he said. “ You are going to see a little bit of an uptick in May because of Memorial Day weekend. For example, we had a full flight to Clearwater last week ahead of the Memorial Day weekend. But then later this week, traffic started dropping back down again.”
Both airlines are seeing travel with Allegiant perform well, despite the carrier continuing to cancel a large portion of scheduled flights. PIA’s Gene Olson said Allegiant passengers are generally traveling for pleasure, flying to destinations like Las Vegas, Nashville and Fort Myers. That’s in line with what’s being seen at CIRA.
“We are seeing the return of the leisure travelers. We are still seeing very slow response from the business travelers and I think that reflects the fact companies haven’t given the green light to travel yet and people are still working from home and not traveling period,” said Carl Olson.
And after months of historically low passenger volumes, he said, there’s nowhere to go but up.
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