Airport Experience® News - Customer Service Issue 2024

LATEST BUZZ

SYR’S BIG BOOST With Record Passenger Numbers, Syracuse Hancock International Is Prepping For Future Growth

BY SARAH BELING

raffic at Syracuse Hancock International Airport (SYR) has hit record highs, and after several years of significant increases, officials decided that it was time to expand. “In 2019, we started to kick off a new master plan for the airport, at which time we recognized that we were short in a lot of areas, including terminal space, so we really focused on gates, concessions, things like that, “ says Jason Terreri, executive director of the Syracuse Regional Airport Authority . As SYR officials put together a plan to overhaul the central New York airport’s terminal spaces, a simultaneous opportunity appeared. In 2022, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul’s office awarded T

$230 million to nine upstate airports for facility improvement – including $20 million allocated to SYR for updates to the airport’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Federal Inspection Station (FIS) as well as renovation to its north concourse, Terminal B. Planning upgrades at SYR “just happened to align with the New York State upstate airport initiative,” says Terreri. “We applied for the grant for the two projects that we knew were coming up, and we were successful in getting about $20 million” to begin work on its renovations, adds Terreri. The timing couldn’t have been better as the airport reached approximately 2.8 million passengers in 2023, an “all-time record,” for traffic, says Terreri. “We’ve been breaking

Above: Syracuse Hancock International Airport has had record passenger numbers, growth that prompted the airport to take on a terminal expansion project.

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AX NEWS OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2024