Tampa International Airport

Tampa International is the primary airport for Florida's Gulf Coast and the Tampa Bay metropolitan area's principal aviation gateway, handling roughly 25M passengers (2024) across 207 weekly routes to 110 destinations on 38 airlines. TPA consistently ranks among the top 30 U.S. airports by enplanements and has been repeatedly rated the best mid-size airport in North America by Skytrax and J.D. Power, a reputation rooted in its distinctive 1971 landside-airside hub-and-spoke design that placed the main processing building at the center and reached four remote airside satellites via automated people-mover — an architectural model later copied at MCO, ATL, and MIA. TPA is a focus city for Southwest Airlines and a crew base for United Airlines, without being the primary hub of any single carrier — an unusual configuration that produces broad but not dominant coverage. Southwest operates the largest share of daily departures, followed by Delta, American, JetBlue, and United. International reach is concentrated on the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and direct transatlantic service to London Gatwick, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Zurich, primarily seasonal. Three runways — one at 11,002 ft (3,353 m), one at 8,300 ft (2,530 m), and a crosswind at 6,999 ft (2,133 m) — handle around 600 movements per day with ample spare capacity. The airport sits 4 mi (6 km) west of downtown Tampa at 26 ft (8 m) elevation on the eastern shore of Tampa Bay. The Main Terminal completed a $971M expansion in 2018 adding an automated SkyConnect people-mover, consolidated rental car facility, and a commercial district (TPA Taxiway Village) planned to include hotels and office space. A second phase, Airside D, is under construction and will add 16 gates for international and transatlantic widebody service when it opens in 2028.