Northwest Arkansas National Airport won’t know its total number of 2024 passengers until January, but it already knows this is a record year.
XNA administrators late last week shared the airport’s November stats, showing 1,045,971 passengers through 11 months. Its previous best year was 991,489 passengers in 2023.
There’s every reason to believe XNA will top 1.1 million passengers by the time all the counting is done, and its certain to fall far short of 1.2 million.
The airport saw 99,564 people board flights in November. XNA chalked up at least 99,000 passengers for seven consecutive months.
XNA’s three legacy carriers — American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines — are driving the airport’s growth this year. All three airlines boarded more passenger in this year’s first 11 months than they did in all of 2023.
While American always carries the highest number of passengers from XNA, and that’ll be true again this year, the sheer number of additional passengers this year is being led by Delta and United.
Delta has already carried 166,814 people, about 28,000 more than it did in all of 2023. United is 24,000 passengers ahead of 2023’s total; American is 16,000 higher.
The airlines dramatically increased how many seats they’ve had for sale at XNA this year.
For example, a typical day in October and November last year had about 3,200 seats being sold by the airlines on XNA’s outbound flights. This year’s total in those same months was closer to 4,200 most days.
That additional seat capacity made it easier for Northwest Arkansas travelers to find seats on flights at the time they want to fly. That extra availability decreased the likelihood that people would choose to drive to more distant airports and then fly.
