The year 2015 marked a banner period for the Sault Ste. Marie Airport: it reached a new milestone for passenger travel and ushered in a suite of renovations to modernize the facility.
On Nov. 20, the airport processed its 200,000th passenger (over 12 months), a new benchmark. Most of the increase came in September, October and November, with November experiencing a double-digit increase, noted Terry Bos, the airport’s president and CEO.
Bos attributes the hike to the fall in value of the Canadian dollar, which is encouraging more Americans to travel north of the border. It’s enabled the airport to recapture some of the American business it lost over the last few years, during the peak of the Canadian dollar.
“We had some data in the past that (showed) we were losing anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 passengers we could have been carrying to American airports,” Bos said. “So we have a feeling that maybe we’re getting a percentage of that back and that’s what’s really led to the turnaround.”
The bump comes just as the airport is undertaking a major terminal expansion project, which will increase functionality, improve service, and modernize the airport’s aesthetics.
EPOH, a Sault Ste. Marie architecture firm, designed the airy, glass-walled expansion, which is pegged at $2 million, about half of that coming from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corp.
The project includes an expansion of the post-screening passenger area to accommodate more passengers, a larger area for international travellers being screened through the Canadian Border Services Agency, as well as a larger passenger-screening area for the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority.
The airport is also adding another checkout counter to accommodate additional airlines, Bos said. It will be used by the SunWing for the sun destination flights offered in the winter months, but can also accommodate any new airline that might come into the airport.
The hold room will have new washrooms and a new food provider, Morningstar Hospitality, which also operates food counters at Sault Area Hospital, Algoma University, and Essar Steel Algoma. Morningstar will provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner service, and will be able to serve alcohol to waiting passengers with its new liquor licence. The counter will operate daily from 5:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., a big change from the former Monday-to-Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. service.
“It’s a big change, something that was really needed and we’re really happy with,” Bos said.
Not all the changes are in the interior. The long-term parking lot now has an extra row of parking spots, while the short-term lot now has a second exit gate to help traffic flow. A second pay station has been added as well, to help speed up lineups of exiting cars.
In late 2015, the airport also announced a renewed partnership with the Sault Ste. Marie Economic Development Corp. to attract new economic development opportunities to the airport.
While the airport has done a lot of work in recent years bringing in new airlines, and now expanding and modernizing the terminal, next it wants to diversify its tenant base so business is not solely reliant on airport traffic.
Bos said the goal is to establish a business park with new hangars to attract new tenants to the airport. Ideas to date include a small-aircraft maintenance and repair business, a paint operation, or anything that is complementary to aviation.
“So, any kind of business that really needs to be close to an airport for quick, just-in-time delivery or stuff like that,” Bos said. “We’re open to bringing in non-aviation aspects here to the airport, too, as part of this business park.”
While some site servicing will need to be done to accommodate new tenants, Bos said the work can be completed fairly quickly.
“We have our own on-site water, our own on-site sewage, and natural gas is really run to the majority of that area anyway, so it’ll just be a matter of tying things in together,” he said.
The terminal expansion project is expected to be complete at the end of February, with final cleanup scheduled for the month of March. Bos already has his sights on the next project: upgrading some electrical work, and enhancements to the secondary runway.
Those “big-ticket items” will update infrastructure that hasn’t been upgraded since the 1960s, a throwback from an era of Transport Canada ownership, he noted.
