There will be more activity at Kamloops Airport starting this week as Air Canada resumes flights to Vancouver.

YKA Managing Director Ed Ratuski tells NL News there will be one flight a day, five times a week, from Thursday to Monday.

“It’s an afternoon arrival and departure from June 15 through to July 1, and then we expect them to increase their frequencies in July as well,” he said. “And then, WestJet will also be increasing their frequencies the first week of July to daily service to Calgary, excluding on Saturday.”

Central Mountain Air will also be resuming three weekday flights to Prince George in July, but their exact schedule isn’t available just yet. Low cost airline, Swoop, planned to begin flights between Kamloops and Edmonton this summer, but those plans have been put on hold for now because of the pandemic.

Air Canada temporarily suspended all flights to Kamloops about three months ago, while WestJet operated one flight a day on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays.

“We’re starting to see some movement here, and passenger loads are picking back up. We’re glad to see people start moving and taking advantage of the services out of Kamloops,” Ratuski said. “We certainly won’t reach the numbers we were at last year, but we’re looking at being 50 per cent of where we were last year, by year end.”

He is recommending that all passengers check in online to limit contact with people in the terminal.

“They will be subject to temperature checks prior to boarding and face masks must be worn when they are going through passenger screening – that’s been in place for quite a while already,” Ratuski added.

“We’re working with our airline partners to make sure that no processes are duplicated causing any congestion in different parts of the terminal.”

Throughout 2019, Kamloops Airport processed a record 361,586 passengers, a 2.75 per cent increase from the old record of 351,631 passengers in 2018. Through the first three months of 2020, there were 91,863 passengers processed at YKA, an 11 per cent decline from the 101,966 in the first quarter of 2019.