‘Pack your patience’: Region of Waterloo International Airport seeing record number of travelers

You may have seen the lineup outside your local passport office — there are a lot of people looking to jet off on summer holiday.

Pent-up pandemic demand has seen major bottlenecks at some of the country's largest airports, but it is also good news for more regional centres.

“Pack your patience, it's going to be a record summer,” said Chris Wood, Director of the Region of Waterloo International Airport (YKF), adding the airport is already seeing record numbers of travellers.

He said the historic highs are also expected to continue through the summer and while that's 'fantastic', it does also pose a few challenges.

“With more passengers comes everything needs to expand including more parking and we are teetering right now on being full,” Wood said.

Wood said it's a good problem to have though and the airport is already moving to meet the need with a new lot already under construction which would nearly double the amount of available parking.

“With that, we will [also] have a need to shuttle people back-and-forth from that lot to the terminal,” said Wood. “It'd be about a 90 second drive but it's not walkable and we wouldn't want passengers to do that.”

And that's where the region steps in to help.

Regional council on Wednesday voted to green light a new shuttle service which it says should be running by about September.

Councillors also approved a plan to install six pieces of public art in the terminal expansion.