April is the busiest month for air travel

For anyone whose customers arrive by air, traffic through one Gulf Coast airport is a strong indicator that business is rebounding.

In April, 907,686 passengers traveled through Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers, nearly 12% more than the same month last year.

As impressive as that sounds, here's the kicker: That number was the second-largest monthly passenger count for April in the airport's history. It was just shy of the 924,919 passengers in April 2007, the same year the airport broke 8 million annual passengers.

A late Easter, awful weather in northern states, increased airline capacity and aggressive marketing by tourism agencies on the heels of last year's BP oil spill all contributed to April's strong numbers, says Victoria Moreland, the airport's director of public affairs.

The improvement isn't uniform across the region. Other major Gulf Coast airports aren't seeing the same spikes on an annual percentage change basis. In April, traffic rose 2.8% at Tampa International Airport, for example.