HANOVER TWP., Lehigh County, Pa. – Traffic through Lehigh Valley International Airport continued to climb in April, logging the best four-month start to the year in two decades, officials said Thursday.
Nearly 77,000 passengers traveled through the airport in April, a 4.4% increase compared to April 2023.
Todd Quann, finance director for the Lehigh Northampton Airport Authority, shared the figures Thursday during the body’s board of governors meeting.
Virtually all of that growth came from low-cost carrier Allegiant Air, which carried 14.4% more customers last month than in April 2023.
"This is probably our best year to date [for passenger traffic] since 2004.”Lehigh Northampton Airport Authority finance director Todd Quann
Passenger volumes for traditional carriers American Airlines and United declined somewhat over the same period; Delta served about the same number of passengers.
Taken together, the first four months of 2024 saw 6.5% more travelers use LVIA than the same period last year.
“This is probably our best year to date since 2004” for passenger traffic, Quann said.
Air cargo volumes declined 12.8% compared to last April, however. The airport’s freight facilities handled just shy of 20.6 million pounds of air cargo last month, compared to 23.6 million pounds in April 2023.
Though more people used the airport in January and May of this year than in January and May of 2019, April traffic has yet to surmount its pre-pandemic peak of more than 83,500 travelers.
The airport continues to lag behind some of its peers in airline capacity growth, as measured in the total number of seats available on every plane traveling through LVIA, Quann said.
However, over the last 12 months, LVIA falls roughly in the middle of the pack for growth in total passengers passing through the airport.
“The seats we get, we do use,” said Quann.
