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SALT LAKE CITY — 2023 is expected to be a busy travel year, starting with the upcoming Memorial Day weekend.
AAA published a report Monday estimating holiday travel will return to about 99% of pre-pandemic levels this year, with more people taking to the skies than in 2019. Brian Ng, senior vice president of membership and travel marketing for AAA Utah, added that air travel "could hit an all-time high" in 2023.
That's why both Salt Lake City International Airport officials and Salt Lake City leaders say they believe the next stage of the airport's growth is starting to become available at the right time. In fact, it's already here, as the first five gates of the Concourse A-East project opened Tuesday morning just in time for Delta Air Line's Flight 394 to Atlanta.
Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, airport director Bill Wyatt and Delta Air Lines officials gathered to move aside a 45-foot-wide, 14-foot-tall curtain to reveal a portion of the new facility. They later cut a ribbon to ceremoniously open the facility before the first flight departed.
Tuesday's ceremony marked the first addition to the new Salt Lake City International Airport since it opened in September 2020.
"It's very exciting," Wyatt said, before noting all the additional changes expected in the coming years. "Every year — for the next three years — we're opening something pretty substantial."
The ceremony didn't mark the completion of the project, however. Four gates are slated to open Aug. 22, while the remaining 13 gates, as well as 19 new restaurants or shops, are scheduled to open by the end of October. Wyatt points out that the facility rests on the "bones" of the old airport, specifically, the old Concourse D.
Once complete, Holder-Big-D construction crews will have used 9,625 tons of steel, more than 250,000 cubic yards of concrete, 200 tons of ductwork, 426.2 miles of electrical wiring, 101.6 miles of communications wiring and 65.7 miles of mechanical piping to complete the second phase of the new airport, according to airport officials.
The facility won't just add 22 gates by the fall — during a busy travel year — it will also alleviate an "inconvenient experience" that some passengers have had to deal with since the new airport opened in 2020, Wyatt explained. The airport has used a hardstand for some of its Delta flights, where passengers board a bus to reach their flight or get to the terminal from an incoming flight.
"It was the only option that we had available back in September of 2020 when we had to make all these choices," he said. "But it allowed us to maintain enough seats for passengers, and that starts to go away (Tuesday), slowly. By Oct. 31, it will be gone, altogether."
Meanwhile, Tuesday's opening came a week after airport officials asked the Salt Lake City Council to approve a resolution that would authorize the issuance of up to $600 million in bonds. The new funds would help pay for the completion of the Concourse A-East project, build a new central tunnel between Concourse A and Concourse B, and add four new gates on Concourse B, according to Brian Butler, chief financial officer at the airport.
The council is scheduled to vote on the proposal Tuesday night.
The central tunnel is expected to help reduce the dreaded walk between the two concourses when it opens in the fall of 2024. The airport is slated to add even more gates between 2025 and 2027, as it doubles the number of gates in the coming years.
Mendenhall contends that all the new projects will make the airport easier to navigate as it expands.
"The more that we open, the better the experience is going to get," she said.
Contributing: Karah Brackin and Adam Small
