46.8M travellers used Toronto Pearson Airport in Mississauga in 2024: report

Toronto Pearson Airport in Mississauga remains the busiest airport in Canada — and it’s not even close.

Some 46.8 million travellers made their way through Pearson in 2024, a 4.4 per cent increase from the previous year (44.8 million passengers in 2023), a recent report from the Greater Toronto Airports Authority shows. The GTAA operates Pearson Airport.

Of those 46.8 million passengers, 30.4 million were travelling internationally while the remaining 16.4 million took flights within Canada’s borders, the report shows.

The second-busiest airport in the country last year was again Vancouver International Airport, which handled 26.2 million passengers, according to figures from that airport.

Montreal-Trudeau International Airport was third, with 22.4 million people arriving at and departing from that hub in 2024.

Vancouver (24.9 million) and Montreal (21.2 million) airports also finished second and third, respectively, in 2023.

From 2022 to 2023, passenger traffic at Pearson Airport increased significantly, rising from 35.6 million to 44.8 million as people continued to fly in greater numbers once again following the COVID-19 pandemic and related flight restrictions.

With respect to the increase in number of travellers at Pearson from 2023 to 2024, airport officials said the growth was led by a 7.5 per cent rise in international travel at North America’s most internationally connected airport.

“This was an exceptionally good year for Pearson’s standing as a global travel hub,” said GTAA president and CEO Deborah Flint in a news release. “As we continue to build back towards our 2019 peak in passenger numbers, we successfully attracted seven new airlines to start operations here, the most of any large airport in North America. We also secured the highly coveted title of North America’s Best Airport Over 40 Million Passengers in the annual Airport Service Quality awards, the industry’s gold-standard ranking.”

In 2019, the year prior to the pandemic, 50.5 million travellers used Pearson Airport. That number dropped dramatically to 13.3 million in 2020 and 12.7 million in 2021 before rebounding in the years since.

Flint added the growing numbers at Pearson also “reflect the gains we have already made in the early stages of our new 10-year strategic plan. To accommodate growth and changing customer expectations, we are investing across the airport to improve the passenger experience, support operational resilience and add capacity, including through digital transformation initiatives and adoption of new technologies.”

(Cover photo: Toronto Pearson Airport X)