CHEEKTOWAGA, N.Y. — “You sit on the, on the tarmac for about two, three hours, nobody come to the airplane. Sometimes they tell you, you know, some fancy story. And it's not true. You just sit there,” traveler Bob Ghamandi said.
Frustration and disappointment continue to fill airports across the county and here at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport as the number of flight cancellations and delays continue to soar.
“Everyone is aware that over the last year since COVID restrictions have been lifted, travel demand has gotten back tremendously fast. And the airlines were kind of not in a position to really gear up to that,” said Pascal Cohen, senior marketing manager and aviation business development for the Buffalo Niagara International Airport.
According to a recent study by the travel insurance agency InsureMyTrip, Buffalo ranks fifth in highest percentage of cancellations among all U.S. airports with nearly 5 percent of all flights being canceled from January to May of this year.
That's a big jump from last year as the same study had the airport rank 37th with just 1.6 percent of flight being canceled in that same time period.
But according to Cohen, those numbers don’t tell the whole story.
“If they run into operational issues, the easiest to do is to cancel a couple of flights to cities that don’t have a lot of service like buffalo, or these other medium markets,” he said. “They're not going to cancel a flight that to an airport that may only have one flight because those people would not be able to get out.”
Cohen says while these trickle-down effects have caused cancellations and delays, the issues have happened early enough so passengers are able to be rebooked.
“When I look at the airport itself, just anecdotally, we don't see crowds of people standing around saying, 'Hey, my flight has been canceled. How do I get out of here?' It just doesn't happen,” Cohen said.
According to Cohen a lot of these problems are due to the airlines playing catch-up on staffing. It's an issue he expects will be fixed by the end of the summer.
“If you look at the customer satisfaction, for instance, it's it's still sky high, it's really not affecting people that are at the airport waiting for a flight,” Cohen said.