Airport hub · YVR
Vancouver International closed 2025 with 26.914 million passengers — an all-time record, 102% of the pre-pandemic peak — built on a +15.6% Asia-Pacific surge while transborder traffic to the United States fell 7.1%. Fifty-seven airlines now serve 129 destinations, and YVR has been voted North America’s best airport for the fourteenth time in sixteen years.
YVR’s 2025 record is a geography story. Domestic traffic (13.35 million, 49.6% of the total) grew a steady 3.8% and other international reached 7.40 million (27.5%), but the momentum was trans-Pacific: Asia-Pacific volumes jumped 15.6%, with monthly records set in nine of twelve months. The airport averaged about 73,700 passengers a day and carried 365,000 tonnes of cargo — also a record, up 7.4%.
Airlines rewrote the route map accordingly: Air Canada added Manila and resumed Beijing, China Southern returned to Guangzhou, China Eastern resumed Shanghai, and T’Way Air opened Seoul. Air Canada’s first-ever Sapporo non-stop follows in December 2026 (three times weekly through March 2027). The counterweight is the border to the south: transborder traffic — 6.16 million, 22.9% of the total — declined 7.1% amid the broad Canadian downturn in US travel.
YVR is one of the few North American airports where the international mix, not the domestic base, sets the strategic tone. Revenue hit CAD 666.3 million in 2024 (+4.4%, +20.1% versus 2019), and Skytrax ranked YVR the best airport in North America for the fourteenth time in sixteen years and 13th worldwide — a service premium that supports the Asia-facing network.
The TIO framing: watch the transborder line, not the headline. A 7.1% US decline absorbed without a total-traffic loss is what a diversified gateway looks like; the 2026 question is whether Asia-Pacific growth keeps covering the American gap — and whether the Sapporo-style additions keep YVR’s network ahead of Seattle’s.
The TIO Read: Vancouver’s airport is the city in miniature — Pacific-facing, premium, and quietly decoupling from the US market. The 2025 record (26.9 million, 102% of 2019) was built while the transborder segment shrank 7.1%, which tells you where the growth model now lives. For travellers and airlines alike the signal is the route map: Manila, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Seoul, Sapporo. As long as Asia-Pacific keeps printing double digits, YVR stays the western hemisphere’s most credible transpacific mid-continent hub — and every new China-facing frequency is worth more than a point of transborder recovery.
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