With traffic on the rise and a host of new domestic routes launched in the last few months, San Diego International Airport's bounce back from COVID is beginning to gather pace. Sixteen new domestic services this year and steadily increasing frequencies on a number of existing destinations means that the Californian gateway currently has one more non-stop route than it did before the pandemic. Smaller, secondary cities have accounted for the bulk of the growth, and rising interest in San Diego itself both as a beach destination and as a place to do business - it is home to the third biggest biotech and biomedical science cluster in the US - is driving the recovery, with San Diego International Airport (SAN) now handling around 75% of the daily traffic it welcomed pre-COVID. The upturn, boosted by the June 15 lifting of most of California's COVID restrictions, has led to cautious optimism that more passengers will pass through SAN this year than the 9.2 million that used the gateway in 2020. The airport authority doesn't do calendar year predictions, but forecasts that 6.2 million passengers will use SAN in its FY2022, although there is a good chance that the figure will be higher if the airport enjoys a strong end to 2021.
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