Check Out How Much Traffic Was Down at Minnesota's MSP in 2020

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It's not a real surprise, given how much we all stayed home last year, but the numbers are in and check out just how much traffic was down at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

I'm guessing that you'd see similar numbers if you looked at many local restaurants, bars, and other businesses that were affected by the state-mandated shutdowns, but, wow, passenger traffic was REALLY down at Minnesota's biggest airport.

According to a release issued Friday from the Metropolitan Airports Commission, (which runs the Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport in Bloomington) passenger traffic was down 62 percent in 2020 compared to figures from 2019. Wow. That's a pretty big drop off! Still, though, MSP reported that 14.9 million total passengers went through the gates-- even during our ongoing pandemic.

Before the coronavirus outbreak put the breaks on everything in March of 2020, the airport had been enjoying increasing numbers of passengers each year. In fact, the release noted that MSP had 10 straight years of passenger growth, setting a new record with 39 million in 2019.

The biggest spike in travel at MSP happened in December of last year, the release said, when nearly 22,000 passengers went through MSP checkpoints on December 27th. Which sounds pretty good-- until you look at numbers from 2019. The December 2020 total number of passengers at MSP was 1,079,757-- but that was still down 66 percent compared to the 3,221,082 passengers in December 2019.

We last flew out of MSP back in early March last year when we took a quick vacation down to New Orleans for the last day of Mardi Gras, which ended up being only two weeks before the pandemic shut just about everything down. It's hard to believe we're coming up on the one year anniversary of the awful COVID-19 outbreak, isn't it?

Of course, the pandemic caused a LOT of change not just here in Minnesota, but across the country, as many businesses found it tough to keep their doors open. Sadly, many weren't able to. Keep scrolling to check out some familiar brands that aren't with us anymore.