MSP Airport prepares for a busy MEA weekend

Despite pricey airline tickets and packed flights, Minnesotans are expected to flock to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport this week during the annual fall break for teacher conferences.

The Minnesota Educator Academy (MEA) break means that school-age kids across the state have Thursday and Friday off — a long weekend that many families use for a mini-vacation before the holidays.

The result is that Wednesday and Thursday are expected to be the busiest days for airport travelers this week, according to the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC), which operates MSP.

"We're prepared to welcome and help travelers get off to a great start to their fall vacations this week," said Brian Ryks, the MAC's chief executive officer, in a news release.

MSP and other airports nationwide are still recovering from the COVID-19 outbreak and travelers are hungry to take to the skies, despite an uncertain economy and the slower-than-expected recovery of business travel, according to Henry Harteveldt, travel industry analyst with San Francisco-based Atmosphere Research Group.

Overall flight traffic through the summer and early fall at MSP has been about 75% to 80% of pre-pandemic levels, according to MAC spokesman Jeff Lea.

Thursday will likely be MSP's busiest departure day of the week, with more than 36,600 passengers expected to clear Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoints. Wednesday will be a close second, with about 36,000 passengers.

By comparison, more than 42,000 travelers went through TSA checkpoints on a single day in 2019 for MEA weekend, Lea said, not counting travelers making connections through MSP.

A spokeswoman for Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines, MSP's dominant carrier, said the airline has a load factor approaching 95%, which is in line with last year — meaning the carrier has sold most of its available seats out of MSP for the long weekend.

Delta's domestic flight volume this weekend is 80% restored from 2019 levels, while the figure is closer to 90% for international flights. The carrier added capacity this coming weekend from MSP to popular warm-weather destinations like Orlando, Fort Myers and Sarasota-Bradenton, Fla., and Palm Springs, Calif.

Departures to and from MSP for Sun Country are up 20% compared with the same long weekend in 2019, and top destinations are San Francisco, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Palm Springs, Cancun, Orlando, Fort Myers, and Tampa, a spokeswoman said.

Sun Country will operate 42 different routes to and from Minneapolis-St. Paul this year compared with 28 over the same weekend in 2019. That's a total of 404 flights and more than 65,000 passengers.

Delta has added staffing at its gates and will also have its Peach Corps office workers deployed in the main lobby to assist travelers, along with MAC employees. TSA has added screening staffers from its National Deployment Force, as well as extra canines.

Travelers may notice that about 92% of MSP's dining and retail options have reopened as the pandemic has ebbed.

For those looking ahead to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, Harteveldt said low-fare airlines such as Sun Country, Southwest and Frontier at MSP "create some pricing pressure on larger airlines, such as Delta." He added that Delta "is so large at MSP that it may not always match some of the lower fares charged by its less-expensive competitors."

It's best to shop early for flights and book them right away if the schedule and budget works for you, Harteveldt said.

"After two years of staggering financial losses, airlines are in no mood to be charitable," he said. "They're eager to claw their ways back to profitability."