Interestingly enough, I flew with Air Transat recently and my boarding pass was printed on an Air Canada card.

YYZ themselves said that they wouldn't consider themselves a mega hub until they got to 50M passengers. They met the other criteria - now they meet that one too.

What airport did you depart from? If it was CUTE (common-use terminal equipment), it's likely nothing more than someone forgot to change the ticket stock at that particular counter...or AC was 'borrowing' TS stock.

YUL Montreal

Curious to know if all flights are full from China to YVR...all the Chinese airlines seem to be flying into YVR as scheduled ?...was it only Air Canada that suspended flights to China?

Air China is still flying to YUL.

Just saw numbers for YYC for January


January
1,337,788 -3.6%

Domestic
881,941 -6%

Transborder
279,058 +5%

International
176,789 -4%

Any thoughts ?


Not so good !

All Chinese airlines reduced operations, and some suspended routes, but did not do a total pullout like Air Canada. YVR seems to have fared better than a lot of airports, where we still had reductions but to a less extent than most other cities with flights to China. I'm actually surprised by AC's withdrawl so quickly. Even today it announced a further cancellation of YYZ-HKG until end of April, that is shocking to me since HKG isn't even the focus of the epidemic, and that route is basically an AC flagship routing.

Curious to see how other major airports will do in January ...

Have a look back a page or two for YOW for January. +0.7%. Not bad at all considering YOW-ORD is still suspended until early March and Porter flying was down by about 5x daily in January vs 2019.

It’s being slowly reduced to 1x weekly by March 11. That should tell you how full the flights are.

As per Airlineroute (see link below):

YYZ-HKG has more to do with the protests killing demand for almost a year now. COVID was the icing on the cake. Makes sense to consolidate on YVR-HKG.

Definitely not full, and definitely not as scheduled. A lot of reductions.

Latest round of cuts:

https://www.routesonline.com/news/38...as-of-21feb20/

Seems like AC continue to remove MAX from the peak of summer in this week's update.. Now only a handful of MAX left in the summer schedule.

Route partially converted to Rouge
YUL-YWG,YEG
YYZ-YEG,YQR

The following route will receive Rouge 763
YYZ-YEG,YHZ,YYT

From the above conversion, 223 will no longer operates between YUL and YWG, YEG, instead, they will be deployed to
YYZ-SEA
YUL-LAX

Route partially convert to Mainline
YUL-PLS,FLL,MCO ... 1x weekly each

Route partially convert to Express
YYZ-ORD


Not listed are some 1x weekly reduction of many Rouge routes.

YYJ (Victoria) is installing Primary Inspection Kiosks this year :) Great news... gets kinda backed up sometimes...this should help.

https://www.victoriaairport.com/proj...ional-arrivals

https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/travel-v...k-bip-eng.html

Interesting. YYJ has a weird setup relative to any of the other airports I have used. You pickup your bags first then go through Canada customs. Wonder if they will put the kiosk before baggage or after.

nevermind.

Really? A widebody is much less claustophobic and better for your health, being able to get up and stretch your legs, there's no comparison. There's also the very real issue of how much worse for the environemnt it is to have direct flights from every small city rather than the use the more efficient hub and spoke model.

That type of thinking doesn't apply if you're a global hub. Global hubs look at their continent as their 'domestic' market. Dubai International, Amsterdam Schiphol, London Heathrow, even airports like Dublin market and position themselves as hubs for their entire region NOT just the country they exist in. YYZ's de facto domestic market is ~360 million people.

I do agree that YYZ has fabulous connectivity but passenger volumes do matter. By that metric, YYZ isn't one of the big boys and dropped out of the Top 30 for 2019. YYZ (and the Golden Horseshoe) would need to dramatically boost volumes to be considered one of the world's dominant hubs.... 100 million PAX for the GGH airports at least.

Air Canada cancelling China flights through April:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tra...ries-1.5475003

Suddenly, they have the capacity they've been lacking.

I just received a notification from AC saying my LGA - YUL flight (AC745) operated by a 223 in April 2020 has been downgauged to an AC Express aircraft. It appears that all YUL - LGA flights operated by 223 have been removed from schedules for now.

I was hoping to experience the brand new aircraft...... So sad.