Why Palm Springs airport is breaking records during COVID


Why Palm Springs airport is breaking records during COVID

If you’re heading to heaven, you really should fly out of Palm Springs.

Pandemic-era air travel is a miserable combination of unhappy passengers and unreliable service — except in Palm Springs. There, flying still feels miraculous.

The airport is small and easily navigable. And after you speed through security, you emerge into an outdoor desert garden that might be the best waiting room in American aviation. if we’re lucky, sun-splashed, open-air PSP — the airport’s code — will become a model for post-pandemic flight across California, and especially in the smaller airports of our growing inland regions.

PSP is already the people’s choice. While the pandemic has grounded the travel ambitions of other places, PSP has soared. 2021 was the busiest summer in the airport’s history. Since last June, the airport has set seven new monthly records for passengers; PSP now serves more than 2 million people annually.

Those records may keep falling. Southwest Airlines started service in Palm Springs in 2020 and now flies from there to eight cities, including Sacramento and Oakland. Other airlines have added flights, to destinations from Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale. The 13 passenger airlines serving the airport now offer 35 different routes — creating competition that lowers fares.

In local news reports, airport officials have expressed surprise at this pandemic surge; they hadn’t projected a return to pre-COVID numbers until 2023. But PSP, a former military base converted six decades ago, has long found ways to succeed in hard times.

PSP has prospered ever since the Great Recession, even as other Western airports stagnated. One reason: a growing colony of Canadians buying Coachella Valley properties after the collapse of the housing bubble. To serve them, the airport established non-stop service to Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Winnipeg. In the process, PSP set new records for passengers in seven of the eight years from 2012-19.

The airport’s growth has been supported by careful, sustained investments — a new control tower, a ticket lobby expansion and a better baggage handling system — that have added capacity without reducing convenience.

But Palm Springs can’t take all the credit for its growth. The awfulness of LAX has driven customers to find alternatives. And Ontario Airport, the nearest Inland Empire rival to Palm Springs, was badly mismanaged, shedding flights and passengers for most of the 2000s and 2010s.

When COVID hit, PSP, with that outdoor space, felt like a safe place to visit — not unlike Palm Springs. The Coachella Valley’s great weather, and its tradition of indoor-outdoor living, has made it a popular place to pass the pandemic.

I made my maiden voyage recently from PSP to Oakland, after a tiring day of reporting around the valley.

For the first time I can remember, an airport refreshed me. I made it through security in two minutes, having to wait only for a very polite family wearing Toronto Maple Leaf sweatshirts. I lay down on a shady bench in the garden, before heading up into the Sonny Bono Concourse to grab a sandwich at an open-air restaurant. I also took in fabulous views of Southern California’s two highest mountains, Mt. San Gorgonio and Mt. San Jacinto.

Marveling at the scene, I told an airport worker that the only thing missing was a swimming pool. She quickly corrected me — there is a pool, but it’s in the general aviation part of the airport, for those who fly privately.

I’ve heard people compare the look of the airport to the NBC show, “The Good Place,” a comedy that offered a sun-splashed view of the afterlife. Of course, we mere mortals have no way of knowing whether PSP really looks like heaven. But Palm Springs does have one advantage on that other paradise: an airport that makes it easy to get in and get out.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.


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