SFO expecting busy summer after passing new traffic milestone

San Francisco International Airport (SFO) reached a post-pandemic milestone last Thursday and Friday, exceeding 70,000 departing passengers per day through its checkpoints for the first time in over three years.

Having cleared this threshold, SFO is looking forward to a busy summer travel season, forecasting the highest levels of passenger traffic since the pandemic began.

The summer travel season will begin in earnest on Friday, May 26, 2023, with approximately 140,000 forecasted passengers travelling through SFO.

In total, 14.9 million passengers are expected at SFO between Memorial Day and Labor Day, which represents about 85% of summer travel levels in 2019.

Passengers traveling during the summer season are strongly encouraged to arrive at the airport at least 2 hours prior to departure for domestic flights and 3 hours prior to departure for international flights.

For the 2023 summer travel season, SFO offers new international airlines and destinations, including ITA and United Airlines to Rome, Norse Atlantic to London, and ZIPAIR to Tokyo.

Airlines resuming service at SFO this summer include Iberia to Madrid, LEVEL to Barcelona, Qantas to Sydney, and Condor to Frankfurt.

The airport notes that domestic travellers also have more choices than ever before, with low-cost airline Breeze Airways launching nonstop service to Cincinnati and new nonstop service on United Airlines to New Orleans.