The Managing Director at Kamloops Airport says he is hoping passenger volumes at YKA will be a lot closer to normal by this summer.

Ed Ratuski though says it remains contingent on the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine as well as if travel restrictions are lifted by then – noting he is taking things one month at a time.

“We plan out ahead for the activity here. If we start to see the travel restrictions come off, that’s when we’ll start to see that kind of pent up travel demand picking up. In terms of our own forecasting, we were forecasting to see that sometime this summer.”

Over the last two weeks, WestJet announced two fewer flights to Calgary while Air Canada is temporarily suspending all service to Vancouver starting this Saturday.

“We’re only seeing like maybe 50 per cent load capacities, if that, on most days which is quite low,” he told NL News. “In a normal season, we would have load factors anywhere from 70 to 90 per cent with multiple flights.”

“The airlines did add frequencies over the holidays to meet the limited travel demand there was, but it was certainly nothing we would normally experience this time of year, both with friends and family travel and then tourist travel up to Sun Peaks and to other areas within the region,” he said.

Meanwhile, the CEO of Tourism Kamloops says the passengers in and out of YKA these days are mostly people travelling for work, noting what is happening across the airline industry across Canada is ‘scary’.

Bev Desantis says we are seeing flight reductions across the country – with all airlines – as a function of the pandemic.

“I think this is just another measure knowing that the numbers are not getting any better. In fact they’re probably worse than they’ve ever been,” she said on the NL Noon Report. “When you look at airlines and the cost of doing business, it is a huge amount of money and how long can those coffers continue to support that with flight capacities of 8-per cent.”

“It’s never a good thing to see that we’re being cut off from specific routes and markets that are key to our industry and to our economy, but I hope that we can work together with these organizations to bring back those flights as soon as possible.”

Last week, Premier John Horgan says the province is looking for legal advice over non-essential out-of-province travel during the pandemic so that people know what is technically allowed and what isn’t.

And Ratuski previously told NL News that he expects airlines in Canada to start seeing ‘significant recovery’ from COVID-19 slowdowns to start happen in mid-2021.

– With files from Brett Mineer