What’s new at the Eagle County airport heading into winter 2025-26
New flights, new exit lanes and more await travelers flying to and from EGE
Chris Dillmann/Vail Daily archive
Despite statewide reports of declining tourism, the Eagle County Regional Airport is having its best year ever.
“It has been a good year, and it’s going to be a good winter,” said David Reid, the airport’s director of aviation, in a presentation to the Eagle County Board of Commissioners on Monday afternoon. “By every indication, it should be a record winter for us.”
The increased demand has driven a need for development at the airport in winter 2025-26, from more flights to improved infrastructure.
What is driving EGE’s growth?
At the end of 2024, airport staff set a goal to increase enplanements — the number of passengers boarding aircraft at an airport — by 10% in 2025 over the average of the last three years.
As of October, the airport’s enplanements were up more than 33% over the three-year average, and 12.5% over 2024.
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November enplanement numbers have yet to be confirmed, but based on the number of people that passed through the airport’s TSA checkpoint, it looks like the growth continued.
“We should hit the record annually through November,” Reid said.
“Thanksgiving weekend, we probably topped last year’s record. We just don’t have those final numbers yet,” said Josh Miller, the airport’s deputy director of aviation.
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The airport’s growth will not continue indefinitely. Limited by its one runway and seven gates, the airport has a ceiling on how much service can be added going forward.
“At some point, it will have to level out,” Reid said.
“There is only so much capacity,” Miller said.
“The winter months (are) pretty much built out … it’s the summer months that I think we still can add to,” Reid said.
One of the airport’s identified strategic priorities is to provide year-round, affordable air service for locals. In pursuit of this goal, the airport now sees nine commercial flights per day in the offseason, up from three to four per day in summer 2023.
This year, enplanements from April through June increased 24% over the three-year average, and by nearly 20% from July through September. Planes fly directly from Eagle County to Denver, Dallas, Chicago and Houston year-round.
United also upgraded the plane it uses to fly in and out of the airport, increasing seat capacity by 30% to 40%, Miller said. “That’s also indicative of a big investment in the market (by United).”
The locals-friendly approach to building flight schedules seems to be working.
“I don’t think I’m ever on a flight in or out of Eagle without knowing at least a dozen people on that airplane ever anymore,” Miller said.
What’s new for winter 2025-26
The airport’s winter flight schedule begins the week of Dec. 15. Some days this winter, the airport will see more than 30 commercial flights.
“That will be exciting and very challenging for us, as well,” Reid said.
There will be new nonstop service on Delta to New York City, N.Y. (JFK) and Minneapolis, Minnesota, on United Airlines to Washington, D.C. (Dulles International Airport) and on American Airlines to Charlotte, N.C.
“Charlotte is a very popular destination point, but also a connecting point to Latin America and international,” Reid said.
The airport is hosting gate celebrations on Thursday, Dec. 18, for the Charlotte flight and on Saturday, Dec. 20, for the New York City, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. flights.
“It is such a big Saturday, the biggest that the airport has ever seen,” Miller said.
Alaska Airlines is also adding a fourth day of service to San Diego after a strong initial year of service in winter 2024-25.
On the infrastructure front, passengers exiting the airport’s secured areas will notice that instead of a TSA-operated metal grate covering the exit, they will instead leave the airport through mechanical exit lanes.
“From the public’s side, it is a huge improvement,” Miller said.
“Where we’ve always had to raise the gate to allow people out, this eliminates that,” Miller said. “Once we get this project 100% finished, no one has to guard that gate anymore.”
Miller said TSA has needed 2.3 staff members per week to operate the exit gate.
“When TSA has been short-staffed and really busy, there have been times that people have had to wait a couple minutes for somebody to show up and open up the gate,” Miller said.
The new exit lanes can automatically detect and respond to illicit behavior.
“This is a big improvement in customer service and overall security,” Miller said. “If you stop and turn around and even make a slight motion to go back in, you set off alarms, doors close, it locks down.”
The project is not completely done; a glass wall will soon be installed to block the area of the exit not covered by the exit lanes. When construction is finished, a TSA agent will not need to stand by the gate to allow people to exit or monitor the exiting process.
The exit lane technology cost under $500,000.
It was “a shockingly inexpensive project in the grand scheme of things for what the technology is,” Miller said.
To accommodate the increase in flight volume, the airport added a seventh full-time, dedicated terminal gate by transforming a former emergency door.
“We got creative,” Miller said.
“That should really help,” Reid said.
The airport is also making one of the car rental booths into an “activation space,” Miller said. “Somebody will be able to lease the space short-term through our advertising company … and do a pop-up market in the terminal to sell their local wares.”
“It’s a pretty innovative way to do that,” Reid said.
