Traverse City’s Cherry Capital Airport (TVC) keeps breaking records, and how it's doing it is going to surprise you.

In July, the airport tallied 124,000 passengers, its busiest month ever. It wasn’t a fluke, either: In 2024, TVC has also broken monthly records for June, August, and September, and is eyeing a record year overall. Those records come amidst high inflation, as well as tourism trends that local experts say are flat or even down compared to previous years. It all begs the question: What’s behind TVC’s seemingly-unstoppable growth?

According to airport CEO Kevin Klein, TVC is on track to beat its overall passenger total from 2023 by 11 percent. The growth is even starker when you compare 2024 numbers to pre-pandemic tallies. Per Klein, TVC is “up around 40 percent in passenger numbers” from 2018 – a statistic that makes it a one-of-a-kind success story among American airports.

“There just are not any airports anywhere that can say that, except maybe Sarasota,” Klein says, in reference to the since-2018 growth. “When we announced our year-round Charlotte service, we ranked number one in the U.S. for percentage of seats being added to a market from July 2024 to January 2025. We added almost 3 percent, and the next closest was Charlotte at 2.2 percent. The national average is pretty close to zero or no growth.”

The natural assumption is that Traverse City’s status as a tourism magnet is propelling the airport toward terminal velocity. But Trevor Tkach, president and CEO for Traverse City Tourism (TCT), previously told The Ticker that local tourism has actually been sluggish in 2024, citing inflation, high interest rates, and low consumer confidence. Traverse City still attracted visitors this summer, Tkach assured, but most spent less money here, and many opted for day trips rather than staying overnight.

The recent boom times at TVC prompted the airport to take a closer look at local travel trends. Those numbers told an interesting story.

“Since 2019, overall visitors have been down [in northern Michigan],” Klein tells The Ticker. “We were at about 6.3 million, and we're down to about 5.8 million since then. Now, when your overall visitor count is down, how does that translate to use of the airport? One would think we'd see declining numbers, but we're not. Instead, we’re looking at another record-setting year. So, our question was: Why are we growing when the rest of the region for tourism has been declining?”

For one thing, Klein says 97 percent of visitors actually come into the region via car “or other mode of transportation” – such as the occasional cruise ship. That leaves just 3 percent of tourists getting to TC via air.

The numbers also don’t support the commonly-held belief that local tourism has ballooned over time.

“When we look at the last 10-15 years, we’ve pretty much averaged 6 million visitors to our area each year,” Klein explains. “When the economy is good and people have discretionary money to spend, we might go up to 6.3 million. When discretionary income is a little tight, we drop down to 5.8 or 5.5. We don’t see anything skyrocketing above that range or dipping below it.”

TVC’s deep dive on local travel numbers did uncover one skyrocketing statistic: According to Klein, the airport served “just shy of 90,000 local travelers” in 2000. 24 years later, that number has doubled. Therein, Klein says, lies the secret to TVC’s growth.

“It’s the local community,” he says. “The airport’s growth has come from those who have relocated here and now call northern Michigan home. The area has grown, and trips from here have grown almost threefold. And we are capturing more people flying from here versus other choices, and we know we are getting more business travelers, with more people parking and more business people focused on those early morning flights.”

By popularizing remote work and unshackling American workers from the office, the pandemic spurred a rash of relocations to northern Michigan. Klein credits that trend with creating a whole new population of business travelers in the region, most of whom are using TVC as their hub.

The growth in corporate clientele is going to inform TVC’s future. As the airport plans for a $120 million terminal expansion project, one big goal is to meet the needs of the business traveler, whether that means more plugs to charge computers and phones, or “private work areas for doing a conference call or a Zoom meeting before they get on an airplane.”

Business travel will also likely dictate which direct flights TVC prioritizes in the years to come. This summer, for instance, TVC added nonstop service to and from Houston and took its Charlotte service daily, two changes motivated by business travel demand.

“One the reasons American Airlines expanded the Charlotte direct flight is because Charlotte is starting to become a center for the finance world,” Klein says. “And when you have hubs like that, it’s the business travelers that make year-round direct flights worthwhile.”

Other popular nonstop flights among TVC’s business travel class include the airport’s long-time “mainstays” of Chicago and Detroit, but also Denver and Dallas, a pair of flights that started out seasonal and have now “spread their wings into the fall season.” Klein even points to Denver as TVC’s “number one route,” because it is “producing revenue that is outpacing the Chicago route.” TVC hopes to take both flights year-round in the near future.

Also on Klein’s business travel wish list? Direct flights to and from New York (“That one has always been on our list to push for year-round again,” he says) and Atlanta (“It’s the world’s busiest hub; you can go anywhere. So, when you talk about global access for the business traveler, Atlanta is important”).

Not that it’s all about business travel. On the leisure side, Klein says he gets calls all the time about adding direct flights to Las Vegas and Nashville. And among the region's part-time residents, another important group for TVC's growth, the number one ask isn’t for more service to warmer climates, but to…Ohio?

“We have a strong second homeowner population in the Cincinnati area, so adding a direct flight there would be awesome,” Klein says.