Summer travel kickoff boosts San Jose Airport, but struggles persist

SAN JOSE — The summer travel season’s kickoff provided San Jose International Airport with a boost in passenger activity, but the South Bay aviation hub remains far below its pre-coronavirus heights.

San Jose International Airport accommodated more than 1 million passengers in May, the first time in three months that the airport topped the million mark since last October.

The upswing in May, which coincided with the traditional launch of summer travel, also marked three straight months of improved passenger activity at the South Bay travel hub.

San Jose Airport handled just under 1.03 million passengers in May, which was up 6.5% from the more than 966,300 passengers the travel hub accommodated in April, new passenger statistics posted by the airport show.

The last time the airport zoomed above the million mark was in October 2023, when the travel center accommodated nearly 1.06 million passengers.

To be sure, San Jose Airport is showing short-term, summer-bolstered improvement. Even so, the South Bay air travel hub still sputters by some longer-term benchmarks.

The airport’s passenger activity in May was down 2.5% compared with May 2023.

Plus, the South Bay aviation complex is far below the record heights to which it had climbed before the coronavirus outbreak unleashed an array of economic maladies on the worldwide travel industry.

Over the one-year period that ended in May, San Jose Airport accommodated 11.97 million passengers.

That was 23.5% below the record-high 15.65 million passengers the airport handled in 2019, the final year before the start of coronavirus-linked business shutdowns and travel restrictions began.

San Jose isn’t alone in this sort of shortfall. Both San Francisco International Airport and San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport remain well below their respective pre-coronavirus heights.