More Airports to Add COVID-19 Testing

In a bid to further ingrain to a skittish public that flying is safe, especially with the lucrative holiday travel season looming, more airports say they will administer on-site COVID-19 tests.

Until the final week of September, only Alaska’s Anchorage Airport, along with Newark and New York JFK in the New York City area, offered any on-site coronavirus testing for passengers, industry sources told Travel Weekly. And even the testing offered at those New York metro-area airports was limited to 500 per day at JFK and approximately 400 per day at Newark.

Now, more and more airports – as well as airlines – are adopting the practice.

Meanwhile, airports in London, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangalore, India, among others, have COVID-19 testing capabilities. At Frankfurt Airport in Germany, for example, a station run by Lufthansa is capable of administering 20,000 tests per day.

On Oct. 1, Tampa was set to become the first U.S. airport to make tests available to all ticketed passengers. For now, the program is only a 31-day pilot. But during October, Tampa passengers will be able to get either a rapid antigen test for $57 or the more accurate, but slower result, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test for $125.

Miami International Airport plans to make rapid testing available to all passengers by November, airport spokesman Greg Chin told Travel Weekly.

The industry also sees coordinated testing as a replacement for quarantines and border closures. In a letter last month, 18 travel trade organizations called for the U.S. government to work toward the establishment of globally accepted protocols for testing for international air travel.