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It’s a good time to fly in the Bay Area.
In a turnaround that seemed unimaginable a decade ago, airlines that were rocked by spiking fuel prices, a sour economy and a rash of bankruptcies are now flying high, filling Bay Area airports with new and cheaper domestic and international flights.
Flights once available only in San Francisco have flocked to San Jose, now the nation’s fastest growing airport, and Oakland, which has seen a surge in international travel. Gone are the days when the only San Jose to New York flight was a red-eye and the city airport’s only international destination was Mexico. Silicon Valley travelers now fly from San Jose to the Big Apple throughout the day, and jet straight to Japan, China, England, Canada and Germany.
At Oakland’s airport, international no longer means just late night flights to Mexico and a weekly departure to the Azores during the summer. It now boasts flights to Spain, England, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and coming this year, Italy and France.
“The Bay Area and Silicon Valley in particular has become the center of the universe, and every airline wants to be part of the action,” said Chris McGinnis, founder of San Francisco-based travel blog Travelskills.com. “San Francisco appears to be running out of space to accommodate all this, so everyone’s running to San Jose and Oakland to get into the market. With all those new seats and new flights, it means fares are coming down.”
A couple could book a weekend getaway in April with nonstop roundtrip flights from San Jose to Beijing for as low as $470 on Hainan Airlines. They could fly from Oakland to Barcelona nonstop on Norwegian for $588 round trip each.
The resurgence of the Bay Area’s smaller airports has been a delight to travelers, particularly those who find San Jose or Oakland closer to work or home.
“It’s a lot more convenient,” said Tim Renouf, 50, a software engineer at Advanced Micro Devices who now flies direct between home in England and work in Silicon Valley.
“It beats sitting on 101 after a long flight to San Francisco,” co-worker David Stuttard, 47, said with a smile.
For Veronica Niegsch of Pleasanton, more options to fly direct from Oakland to visit family in Mexico have been a blessing.
“I love it,” said Niegsch, 44, a Federal Aviation Administration budget official who was waiting last week to board a Volaris flight to Guadalajara. Not only is Oakland closer to home, but she finds it much quicker to park and get through security. “It’s small, but you have a lot of options. ”
The air travel surge has been a relief to Bay Area airport officials, who bet big on modernizing their 1960s-era facilities during the downturn a decade ago.
Shortly after San Jose approved its biggest-ever bond sale for a $1.3 billion airport makeover, the airport’s top official warned that the U.S. airline industry was “facing its worst crisis in its history.” Fuel prices were soaring, carriers were reporting record losses and a half-dozen airlines had filed for bankruptcy protection.
San Jose and Oakland watched anxiously as struggling airlines consolidated routes at major hubs like San Francisco. Passenger traffic was still falling to 8.2 million in 2010 when San Jose unveiled its gleaming new, spacious high-tech terminal, which had been scaled back from a more ambitious plan. Oakland invested in a $300 million terminal improvement program and a BART transit connection that opened in 2014. Yet passenger traffic that peaked at 14.6 million in 2007 plummeted to 9.3 million with the onset of the Great Recession.
But in the last five years, annual passenger traffic has jumped 25 percent to 55.8 million at San Francisco International, 31 percent to 13.1 million at Oakland International and a stunning 51 percent to 12.5 million at Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport.
“To some extent San Jose has bounced back the most because it had lost the most before,” said Alan R. Bender, professor of aeronautics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide in Daytona Beach, Florida.
Falling fuel prices and a now-booming economy helped pull the airlines out of their tailspin, along with a wave of mergers and a new generation of highly efficient jetliners. Aircraft like the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350 have allowed airlines more freedom to take chances on routes from smaller airports.
“With fuel prices low and these very economical jets, that favors medium markets like San Jose,” Bender said. “They can take risks they couldn’t take a few years ago.”
But patience, persistence and some smart plays helped San Jose and Oakland take advantage as the industry recovered.
In San Jose, city officials spent years courting a direct flight to Asia, something Silicon Valley executives had been craving. They worked with business leaders to assure airlines there was pent up demand for new routes. It eventually paid off when All Nippon Airways launched a direct flight to Japan in 2013 on the new 787 Dreamliner. A wave of other flights quickly followed.
“If a couple carriers go to a new airport, others do follow,” said Carl Guardino, chief executive of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which represents major technology companies. “But it’s really hard to get the first ones to make that bet. We tell that airline that if they come here, we’ll do everything we can to make them successful.”
In five years San Jose went from 29 domestic and two international destinations in 2012 to 43 domestic and 11 international destinations in 2017.
“The rate of growth has been tremendous,” said Marc Casto, president of Casto Travel in San Jose, one of the largest travel management companies in the Bay Area. “It’s one of the fastest growing airports in passenger growth around the nation.”
The growth has been so rapid that San Jose added two gates, bringing the total to 30, and is planning an expansion of up to 10 more.
“We’ve experienced tremendous passenger growth and it’s been a great thing,” said San Jose Airport Director John Aitken. “But with that growth comes some deficiencies in our facilities we’ll have to deal with pretty soon.”
Oakland airport officials bored into travel data and found a huge proportion of international travelers flying out of San Francisco lived in the East Bay or Wine Country, and pursued a strategy to tap that market.
“You can go over to another airport and be the fourth airline going to a European market, or go to Oakland and be the only one,” said John Albrecht, Oakland International’s manager of aviation marketing.
It paid off. Oakland has gone from 29 domestic and three international destinations in 2012 to 48 domestic and 14 international destinations today. International traffic surged 134 percent in the past year, and the airport just completed a $45 million renovation and expansion that doubled its international arrival operations capacity.
San Francisco meanwhile continues to set new records in passenger traffic.
Some airports have seen double-digit growth,” said SFO spokesman Doug Yakel, noting the bounce-back at the Bay Area’s smaller airports. “Our growth has been steady for a number of years.”
McGinnis said the turnabout at the smaller airports has been stunning.
“Multiple flights to Asia from San Jose is something I never thought I’d see,” McGinnis said. “And I never thought I’d see Oakland be the first airport (in the Bay Area) to get a nonstop to Rome. They beat San Francisco to that, that’s a big deal.”
Guardino said businesses don’t see the airports in competition, but that “the goal is to balance out three great airports so that the whole region is successful.”
At the moment, that seems to be working, for both business and leisure travelers. Albrecht said that with so many oversees flights pushing prices down, Bay Area travelers are making weekend getaways to Europe.
“You wouldn’t do it if air fare was $2,000, but now that it’s $500 round trip, it’s suddenly on the list of things to do,” Albrecht said. “That used to be ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.'”
