“Our primary focus right now is to prepare our airport for 2026, and that work starts yesterday,” Saeed said during a recent Philadelphia Business Journal tourism event in Center City.
To do so, PHL is working on bringing back routes that stopped flying during the pandemic due to a lack of demand and improving the customer experience throughout the airport.
Saeed, who was hired in October to oversee PHL and started in December, said the airport predicts that visitation will recover to monthly 2019 levels in late 2025 and has set a goal of achieving annual recovery in 2026.
In terms of flights, PHL is still missing 23 domestic routes and 12 international routes out of the 150 domestic and 40 international routes it boasted pre-pandemic.
The missing domestic flights aren’t as concerning, according to Saeed, although he wants to get them back on the schedule. Of the 23 missing, 21 are shorter regional flights served by small passenger planes that were cut because of a lack of demand during the pandemic.
As for international service, Saeed wants to regain all of the 12 missing routes in 2024. Specific destinations he wants to see make their return are Reykjavik, Iceland; Edinburgh, Scotland; Manchester, England; Budapest, Hungary; Berlin, Germany; and Prague, Czech Republic.
PHL is currently working with American Airlines (NASDAQ: AAL) to see what can be done to put these flights back on the schedule.
Saeed believes bringing international flights back could in turn grow the need for regional flights, which partially serve as quick connections to get overseas travellers to their international flights out of Philadelphia. He said the recovery of business travel would also help increase the number of routes and frequency of flights flown to and from PHL.