The airport says it was a combination of unexpectedly high numbers of end-of-summer travelers, not enough TSA officers to meet the demand, and construction taking two lanes offline.
Port of Seattle spokesperson Perry Cooper said traditionally, summer travel starts to go down in September — and that’s what they had counted on this year.
“With the pandemic, we’re seeing a bit of a changing dynamic in the travel trends … Even though we haven’t had a lot of business traffic come back, which is what we typically see in the fall, we’ve still got a lot of that leisure traffic that just wants to get out and travel,” he said. However, passenger Ray Pardo, who said he waited three hours in the security line Sunday before his flight to Atlanta, believes the airport and TSA should have known to expect this late-summer boom in passengers.
“The airlines and TSA and Sea-Tac management have got to be a lot closer in comparing volumes expected,” he said. He said they were anticipating 59,000 passengers for Sunday, which is comparable to busy summer days. When asked why more TSA agents were not brought on for the weekend when those projections were out ahead of time, Cooper said this was a question for TSA, as they determine their own staffing levels.Future weekends will see things done differently. Cooper said they are already planning to have extra TSA officers this coming Saturday and Sunday.
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