San Jose Airport struggles persist but new flights appear on horizon

SAN JOSE — Struggles with fading passenger trips have worsened at San Jose International Airport, but upcoming new flights to a pair of cities could help lift the aviation hub’s fortunes.

San Jose Airport handled about 880,100 passengers during March, new flight statistics posted by the air travel complex show.

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The latest figures extend a pattern that has emerged in recent months that suggests the South Bay airport has begun to encounter difficulties in expanding its passenger volume.

Compared to the same month in 2024, San Jose Airport passenger trips fell by 5.4%, the new report shows.

Over the one-year period that ended in March, San Jose International handled 11.65 million passengers. That was 1.1% below the number of passengers the South Bay aviation complex accommodated in 2024.

One bright spot: The 880,100 passenger trips through San Jose Airport in March was 17.9% higher than the 746,200 trips that the airport handled in February.

The March trips also were higher than January but were well below the 1.02 million passenger trips in December, a month of peak holiday travel.

Some hope is on the horizon in the form of new nonstop Delta Air Lines flights connecting San Jose to some big cities.

Here are some details of the new Delta flights:

— Las Vegas nonstop trips begin May 7.

— Detroit nonstop slights are due to start July 7.

Bookings are available for both cities.

The difficulties that San Jose Airport is experiencing during the first three months of 2025 extend the slump that began in 2024.

As a result of the coronavirus outbreak, air travel nosedived in 2020 worldwide.

San Jose Airport handled 4.71 million passengers in 2020, a 69.9% plunge from the record-high 15.65 million trips the South Bay aviation center accommodated in 2019, the final full year before wide-ranging business shutdowns ordered by the government crippled the global travel and lodging sectors.

In 2021, air travel zoomed higher at San Jose Airport and other major aviation hubs worldwide with a jump of 56.3% compared with 2020.

Similarly, 2022 and 2023 brought big-time jumps in passenger trips compared with the respective prior years.

The pattern of improvement, however, suffered a loss of altitude in 2024.

The 11.77 million passenger trips through San Jose Airport in 2024 were 2.7% below the 12.1 million passengers in 2023, airport statistics show.

As a result, the airport remains far below its pre-coronavirus heights. The totals for the most recent 12 months that ended in March are 25.6% below the airport’s record-setting passenger totals of 2019.

Similarly, both Oakland International Airport and San Francisco International Airport remain stuck below their pre-coronavirus levels.

Oakland is lagging its 2019 totals by an even bigger margin than San Jose’s passenger shortfall, while San Francisco’s passenger deficit is in single digits.