Summer travel at Idaho Falls Regional Airport
Maggie Moore
Idaho Falls, IDAHO (KIFI) – With school out and sunshine, it’s time for summertime travel. But, this year the Idaho Falls Regional Airport will be a tight squeeze as it faces the second busiest summer travel season ever.
Growth is the theme at IDA as it prepares to expand to fit the growing travel needs. They’re adding new flights, updating parking systems, and starting the groundwork for a terminal expansion.
“This building is at capacity in just about every way you can imagine,” airport director Ian Turner said. “The most critical function of that is screening bags, and so that’s kind of item number one that we’re addressing. We also have interest from additional airlines to fly to Idaho Falls, and so those are top-level pieces of this expansion that we’re looking at.”
But expanding isn’t an overnight process, and in the meantime, travelers will need to adjust their plans to fit the airport’s current capacity.
Turner said that it’s essential to get to the airport 2 hours before your flight, even at smaller airports like Idaho Falls.
“It’s not the checkpoint at this point that’s going to be constrained, it’s bag screening,” Turner said. “When you check your bag at the ticket counter, you expect it to get to your destination. If you’re not allowing it enough time to get through that screening process you run that risk of having it show up after the fact, and nobody likes that.”
Other ways to make travel easier is by checking into your flight ahead of time online, having your REAL ID out and ready for TSA before you get to the podium, and pack light. The less bags you need to check, the easier it will be to get in and out of the airport.
“Growth that we’ve had is fantastic to address, but it takes some work. It it can’t all happen all at once. We’re we’re dealing with government processes that can take months, a year, two years, or more to put into place. So we just ask for people’s patience,” Turner said.