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Bob Hope Airport passenger count trends upward, but at slower pace than early 2015

By Chad Garland
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With few exceptions last year, Bob Hope Airport saw a trend of increased passengers traveling through the Burbank airfield each month, compared with the same months a year earlier.

The trend continued in December, the third straight month of passenger gains following a flat line in September and August, but increases each of the six months before that.

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However, with a bump of 1% in the last month of 2015, the rising trend continued “not at quite the robust pace” as in November, when the airfield saw a 3.7% hike, Mark Hardyment, the airport’s director of government and environmental affairs said Monday during a Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority meeting.

There were 336,235 passengers in December compared with 332,790 in December 2014, but the slight increase fell short of airport projections by about 4,200 passengers.

For the year, there were more than 3.9 million passengers compared with roughly 3.8 million passengers in 2014 — a more than 2.1% increase.

Leading the uptick in December were United Airlines, up more than 3,500 passengers, and Alaska Airlines, up more than 1,400 passengers. After a plateau in November, Delta Air Lines saw a spike of more than 19%, or 1,100 passengers, for the month, compared to the same period in 2014.

JetBlue Airways dropped 5.2%, roughly 500 passengers, and American Airlines fell 11%, or about 1,900 passengers, compared to December 2014. Southwest Airlines, the airfield’s largest carrier, stayed essentially flat for the month.

Other airports in the region also reported December increases, including John Wayne Airport, up 10.5%, and Los Angeles International Airport, up 7.8%.

Ontario International Airport saw a slight decrease of two-tenths of 1%, and Long Beach Airport reported a 1.7% decline.

Bob Hope Airport’s parking revenues decreased nearly 2% in December, at roughly $1.42 million, compared with about $1.45 million in December 2014. The results were about $82,000 shy of projections.

“Parking during the holidays is always a little bit dicey,” Hardyment said.

The number of drivers using parking facilities increased nearly 11%, largely due to rideshare pickups in the short-term parking structure who typically pay $3 for the first 30 minutes. Airport officials believe passengers’ use of such services, rather than driving and parking in long-term lots, may be cutting into parking revenues.

For the year, the airport paid nearly $2.1 million in parking taxes to Burbank’s General Fund, “as we had predicted all along,” Hardyment said. The roughly $2.09 million total was about $45,000 more than the airport paid to the city in 2014.

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Chad Garland, chad.garland@latimes.com

Twitter: @chadgarland

Chad Garland

Chad Garland covered the city of Burbank and Bob Hope Airport for the Burbank Leader until 2016. Previously, he has covered Arizona’s congressional delegation in Washington, D.C., for Cronkite News Service and Oregon’s Legislature for the Associated Press. His work investigating questionable veterans’ charities as part of the award-winning News21 national investigative project “Back Home” earned a “Best in Business” award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers in 2013. Before becoming a reporter, he spent more than a decade in various assignments related to national defense. An Illinois native, his first California address was at Marine Corps boot camp in San Diego. He has degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Arizona State University, as well as a diploma from the Army’s Defense Language Institute in Monterey, where he learned to speak Russian.

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