MINNEAPOLIS — As she prepared to fly Tuesday from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport to Poland via Amsterdam, Makenzie Nokes looked around the airport and reflected on the changes.
Long security lines. Busy staff. Families with strollers rushing to their destinations.
"It feels kind of normal," Nokes said near the entrance to Terminal 1. "It's just been weird to transition from everyone being scared and wearing masks, to... none of that."
Nokes, an Iowa native who works in Poland as a teacher, caught the 7:55 p.m. Delta flight from Minneapolis to Amsterdam. Coincidentally, that route was the first international overseas flight to come back to MSP after the pandemic hit, having returned in the fall of 2020.
Gradually, the other major flights came back as well, like Paris, London, and Tokyo. As it stands now, MSP operates more than a dozen direct routes to international locations: seven in Canada, two in Mexico, two in Asia, and five in Western Europe.
The only route that has not returned after the pandemic is MSP to Dublin, Ireland — except that may be changing next year, too.
Kyle Potter, the executive editor of the Minnesota-based travel website Thrifty Traveler, reported Tuesday that Aer Lingus is preparing to relaunch MSP-to-Dublin service in May 2024. Although the news has not been made public yet, Potter said the airline's filings suggest there will be four nonstop flights a week.
"This is kind of the final piece of the puzzle for Minneapolis," Potter said in an interview with KARE 11. "In terms of the marquee, long-haul routes to Europe, to Asia, this is it. This is everything. So that is a big watershed moment for the airport, and for travelers here based out of MSP."
Previously, there have been some rumblings that Delta was also eyeing a nonstop flight between Minneapolis and Dublin, but a spokesperson for Delta said "there's nothing I'm able to share with you at this moment" and "nothing to confirm." However, Delta is expanding service to both domestic and international locations this winter, including a new route to Maui in December 2023 and additional flights to San Juan, Montego Bay, Punta Cana, Belize and Puerto Vallarta.
"It took a long time, but when travel really fell off a cliff in early 2020, experts said this would be a four to five-year process to rebuild back to 2019 levels," Potter said. "In some ways, we're already past that."
As MSP restores most or all of its international routes, people like Makenzie Nokes are grateful for the added options.
"It's exciting," Nokes said before she got into the security line for her Amsterdam flight. "It marks an end, maybe, of that chapter a little bit."
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