Ontario International Airport CEO Mark Thorpe tells Routes how cargo and international traffic opportunities could lead to the Los Angeles airport growing to 40 million passengers.
What’s the current situation at the airport?

They're actually going pretty well! Being down 55% down on traffic is never a great year but we've actually had a stronger recovery than the rest of Southern California. More than the rest of the state, other than FAT maybe and a couple of smaller airports.
Among the top 50 US airports I think we're in the top three to five, so we've been pretty fortunate to have a relatively strong rebound of our passenger traffic.
The other thing is the cargo growth, that’s been unprecedented for us; 20% to 30% every month since the onset of the pandemic.
It's the fastest growth in North America; ANC is close but that’s cargo passing through to clear customs and for airplanes to refuel. So in terms of an actual market we're growing faster than anyone else.
What’s behind this relative success?

The cargo has been driven by e-commerce; we have UPS and Amazon hubs. And then in November FedEx just opened a new regional hub as well. So I expect that growth to continue into 2021.
We’ve also found a lot of new non-airline revenue streams and done a number of different things creatively to try to maximize revenue on our real estate.
There’s lease revenue from the big FedEx hub, peak period truck parking, car dealerships and rental car company cars. And we’ve brought in online prepaid parking; that’s not new in in Europe but it is in the United States. Note: (ATL has 2 PP Online Parking lots)
I'm excited about 2021 because we more than 300 acres of surplus real estate that we're going to take to the market in January or February, so we're going to be able to create some more revenue streams, independent from airlines, to try and offset some of the operating expenses.