Toronto’s Pearson International Airport fell just shy of serving 50 million passengers in 2018, setting a record and new high-water mark for Canadian airports. The airport released its final passenger numbers Thursday.
In all, Pearson handled almost 49,507,418 passengers, more than 17 million of them headed to points other than in Canada or the United States.
The airport joined Montreal’s Trudeau International as the only two airports serving more people going to overseas destinations that Canadian ones.
More than 18 million people flew to destinations outside North America in 2018 from Toronto, an increase of 7.6% over the previous year. That eclipsed, for the first time, the 17.9 million people who flew to destinations within Canada.
The international growth reflects a strategy by Air Canada, the largest airline at Pearson, to funnel passengers between Europe and the United States through its Canadian hubs.
Passenger numbers to the United States also increased to 12.9 million, up 5.6% on the year.
It was a record year for flying in Canada, with airports large and small reporting their largest passenger numbers ever.
| Airport | 2018 passengers | 2019 passengers |
|---|---|---|
| Abbotsford, B.C. | 842,212* | 1,008,176* |
| Calgary | 17,343,402* | 17,957,780* |
| Charlottetown, P.E.I. | 370,730* | 383,183* |
| Edmonton | 8,254,212* | 8,151,532 |
| Fredericton, N.B. | 423,234* | 427,085* |
| Halifax | 4,316,079* | 4,188,443 |
| Hamilton | 725,630 | |
| Kamloops, B.C. | 351,631 | 361,586* |
| Kelowna, B.C. | 2,080,372* | 2,032,144 |
| Moncton, N.B. | 681,473* | 674,406 |
| Montreal-Trudeau | 19,425,588* | 20,305,106* |
| Nanaimo, B.C. | 435,394 | |
| Ottawa | 5,111,801* | 5,106,487 |
| Prince George, B.C. | 506,486 | |
| Quebec City | 1,774,841* | |
| Saskatoon | 1,518,980* | 1,490,000 (est.) |
| Thunder Bay | 869,404* | |
| Toronto-Pearson | 49,507,418* | 50,499,431* |
| Vancouver | 25,936,907* | 26,395,197* |
| Victoria | 2,048,627* | 1,924,385 |
| Winnipeg | 4,500,000* (estimate) | 4,500,000 (est.) |
CORRECTION: A previous edition of the above table mistakenly said Hamilton had set a passenger record in 2018. This was wrong, and the table has since been corrected. We regret the error.
Hi Brett. For your info, YVR also had more International than domestic passengers in 2018
file:///home/bmorris/Documents/Downloads/December%20Traffic%20Update.pdf
Hi Brent, I agree if you mean US and overseas, but Canadian airports (including YVR) generally report Transborder and International separately. For Montreal and Toronto, overseas passengers outnumber Canadian, and if you include the U.S., it gets even more slanted. For the story’s purpose, the count is the airport definition of international, meaning overseas, passengers. Should I make it more clear, do you think?
YHM’s 2018 pax total is not a record. They’re still about 300k shy their all-time record of just over 1 million back in the short-lived WS hub days.
Thank you! Evidently our records don’t go back far enough. We’ll get that corrected straight away.