It’s been an exceptionally slow spring season at Glacier Park International Airport, but traffic finally has started to pick up this month.

“We’re definitely seeing an increase,” Airport Director Rob Ratkowski said on Monday.

The airport saw more than 400 passengers go through the security checkpoint each day of the past weekend, June 13 and 14. That compares to a mere 21 passengers in one day on April 18, the slowest day the airport has experienced throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. During June of 2019, however, Ratkowski reported the airport received an average of about 1,350 passengers per day.

“We’re still significantly down,” Ratkowski said, but he noted, “it’s definitely trending up.”

Glacier Park International uses a seven-day average to get a sense of traffic trends over time. The most recent seven-day period saw an average of almost 300 passengers per day. At the lowest point of the pandemic, the seven-day average bottomed out at 32 passengers per day.

Passenger numbers reached their lowest points during the last two weeks of April, which tends to be the airport’s slowest month every year, pandemic or not. Ratkowski noticed the numbers start to take off again at the end of May. The trend is generally positive, although Ratkowski said traffic is coming in “fits and starts,” with weekends tending to be significantly busier than weekdays.

“We’re definitely seeing people moving around,” he observed.

Carriers are adding more flights and moving to bigger aircraft this month as demand increases. Ratkowski said carriers have “more flights programmed for July and even more programmed for August.”

Ratkowski isn’t sure where most of the travelers are coming from, since the airport doesn’t get data on passenger origins until the end of each month. But he said carriers have started to see demand increase from airports in big cities where travel nearly came to a standstill during the height of the coronavirus outbreak.

“We know it’s going to trend better,” Ratkowski predicted.

A lot of this progress, of course, depends on safety measures and the comfort of everyone involved.

“We’re trying to keep it as safe as we can,” Ratkowski said. National Guard members will continue to screen inbound passengers for fevers at GPIA until June 24.

The airport has implemented a slew of sanitizing procedures throughout the building, such as providing sanitizing stations and expanding cleaning practices.

Individual carriers have put in place their own methods of trying to reduce the spread of the virus through air travel, including sneeze guards at counters, mask requirements in the airplane and blocked-off seats to keep travelers spread out. Carriers like Delta, which is planning to keep a row of middle seats completely empty until September, are increasing their flight frequency from locations like Denver in order to make up for the reduced seating capacity.

Ratkowski said he has seen most passengers using personal safety measures as well, particularly wearing face masks.

Protecting travelers and the people they interact with on their journeys will be crucial to the recovery of GPIA as a whole. The airport and the carriers are far from the only entities feeling the effects of the air traffic slowdown. Ratkowski reported other GPIA associates such as food concessionaires and rental car companies also have been hard-hit by the recent slump.

Ratkowski said the revenue the airport receives from partners like rental car companies and concessions were down 85 to 90% in the past few months. That business is picking back up now, and the airport fortunately had cash reserves to ride out these uncertainties, Ratkowski said.

But it remains to be seen when the airport’s long-awaited $100 million renovation project will get back up and running after it was put on pause in April because of the virus outbreak. The airport administration and carriers are looking at 2017 monthly averages to determine when GPIA will return to a good starting point for the project, since 2017 was the year they decided the infrastructure could no longer keep up with the demand they were seeing. Currently, Ratkowski said they are at about 30% of the monthly average passenger volume they saw in 2017.

That means things are looking up, but there is still a long way to go before the airport fully recovers to its pre-COVID operations.

“How fast and how intense our recovery is going to be is everybody’s question,” Ratkowski said.

Reporter Bret Anne Serbin may be reached at (406)-758-4459 or bserbin@dailyinterlake.com.