Last 12 months was Denver International Airport’s busiest on record.
While airline stocks have yet to totally get well to pre-pandemic levels, passengers have returned in droves — and hundreds of thousands of them are flying through the Colorado hub.
“We are going to end 2023 much higher than our forecast at about 78 million passengers annually,” said Phil Washington, CEO of the Denver International Airport. “So this has been tremendous growth.”
The airport, referred to as DIA to Colorado locals, opened in 1995. It was originally built to handle 50 million passengers per 12 months, but now that number is predicted to achieve greater than 100 million people per 12 months by 2027, in keeping with DIA estimates.
OAG, a world travel data provider, said Denver went from the twenty first busiest airport on the earth in 2019 to the sixth in 2023.Â
United Airlines is Denver’s biggest operator with 46.7% market share, followed by Southwest at 30.7% and Frontier Airlines at 9.7%, in keeping with DIA.
The midcontinent airport has develop into United’s busiest hub. It recently invested nearly $1 billion in Denver so as to add more gates, flights and destinations, and opened the most important lounge in its network.
“About 60% of our customers are connecting from other places. Forty percent of our customers are local Denver, and it’s a quick growing city,” said Jonna McGrath, vp of Denver Airport operations for United Airlines. “We would like to grow before 2030 to about 650 flights a day.”
CNBC got a behind-the-scenes have a look at United’s Denver operations and explored how the airport and the airline plan to maintain up with demand.
Watch the video to learn more.
