Melbourne has a similar population to Montreal and substantially less population within a 2 hour drive. 33,704,854 passengers passed through Melbourne's airport in 2016. It will be between 35 and 36 million in 2017 so double the level of Montreal Trudeau.

But... to get anywhere, you need to fly out of Melbourne, while from Montreal it's easy to drive to Ottawa (2 hours), Quebec City (2 1/2 hours), Boston (5 hours), Toronto, NYC (6 hours), etc, so there is less of a need to fly. Our main business partners are less than half a day's drive away.

Melbourne is similar to Calgary in this regard so not necessarily a good comparison with Montreal.

Other comparable cities, about the size of Montreal : Berlin sees 21.2M passengers per year, Vienna 22M, Milano 22M, Stockholm 26M

City size is not always proportional to airport passenger traffic. There are lots of other variables at play.

Yes of course it is still something good, I didn't mean to undermine that. I just meant when comparing growth figures, you can only use percentage to rank. You can't rank all others on % terms and then mix in absolute numbers

Not to scuttle the Canada thread.... but....

Another reason is the ties between Sydney and Melbourne.

This one route alone generates over 9 million passengers per year. That’s over 25% of Melbourne Airport’s total traffic. In fact OAG recently did a global analysis and MEL-SYD is the second largest air route in the world by number of flights. It’s not uncommon for there to be over 80 flights a day on that one route alone.

In Australia, Melbourne and Sydney are much more evenly matched as business centres. Sydney still edges Melbourne out though. But the sheer volume of business traffic that flows between these two cities is incomparable.

Toronto’s dominance economically in Canada plays a role here. There just isn’t the volume between Toronto and Montreal.

Melbourne to Sydney (900km) by car takes about 10hrs, while Toronto to Montréal (550km), about 5h30hrs

The Montreal to Toronto air route is currently the 15th busiest in the world, with 480 flights per week.

I'm not disputing the distance factor but the smallest aircraft between MEL and SYD is on 737-8s or 320s. QF flies multiple A330s a day as well. Even if YTZ-YUL were included these are all props as are some even on YYZ-YUL.

I would challenge the 480 flights per week figure because there is no way (with obvious reduced flights on weekends) there are 75 flights per day between YYZ and YUL. I think there's less than 60 per day one way Monday - Friday and that's including YTZ.

YUL's TOTAL domestic last year was about 6.4 million. Again, MEL-SYD just the one route was over 9 million.

Edit: actually I don't even see YUL-YYZ on their list.... certainly not in the the top 20.

https://www.oag.com/hubfs/Free_Repor...Report2018.pdf

The ties (business and other) between MEL and SYD cannot be underestimated.

But how much road traffic is there between Melbourne and Sydney compared to between Montreal and Toronto?
For Melbourne <-> Sydney, this map shows an AADT of 11,218 on the M31 at the marker south of Annie Pyers drive, which seems to be the M31's lowest traffic volume. I couldn't find the data for Victoria.

On highway 401 / Autoroute 20, that link Toronto to Montreal, the AADT at the lowest point is at the border between Quebec and Ontario is 19,600 vehicules per day (source). It's safe to assume that a majority of them go all the way from Montreal to Toronto. On top of this there are 27 buses per day in each direction (busbud) and 7 VIA rail trains each way. I would consider this a good explanation as to why there is less aerial traffic between the two cities.

For YUL, it's simply the domestic side of things. Montreal is pretty close to everything major by car, and Quebeckers don't travel as much across Canada as the ROC does, or as they do in the U.S. We've been over this guys.

Had to go to Toronto for a week right after new years. We are a family of 4. Needless to say, I drove. And my annual income is most likely higher than most people on here (not bragging, just making a point). No way i'm paying 1500-2000$ for a trip to Toronto.

That in itself, describes why the domestic numbers at YUL are weak.

Came back 2 days ago. 5h30 drive door to door, that includes 2 stops. Easy peasy !

VIA rail is ok, but not really convenient with young kids. It's also expensive compared to a vehicle (70-80$ each way per person). Between Montreal and Toronto, with a family, nothing beats a car.

4 million of that is probably solely to/from Toronto.

Neither should the ties between Montreal and Toronto. As I said, most of that traffic, (passenger or cargo) goes by road. The amount of lorries you see on highway 401 between the two cities is ridiculous.

Totally agree on the price point you raise. For the distance travelled, the cost to fly "locally" within Canada is extortionate, and cross-country isn't much better. When I can fly to family in the UK cheaper than family in BC, there's something wrong.

Word to the wise: Prepare to have me step over you or even ON you if you ever do that in front of me in an emergency situation on a plane.

In case this thread needs more anecdotal evidence, when I was living in Ottawa, Waterloo and Montreal I would always take Via as my first choice, and renting a car as the second. I probably travelled by train 80% of the time and by car 20%. I didn't consider flying, given the inconvenience of not arriving downtown and all-in cost. I'm sure having kids would change the cost equation, but when I was single and in a relationship that was my own preference.

Yup more anecdotal evidence. I realise we will all have our opinions.

I also realise the OAG list is airport to airport only so YYZ-YUL would be treated separate from YTZ-YUL. As would AVV-SYD here in Australia.

So again from a business volume sense.... even for a 5 1/2 hour drive each way no (sane) business person would drive between YYZ and YUL for same day business meetings. These people would have to fly and the number of flights and capacity on the route indicates this just cannot be that substantial. The amount of day traffic business between MEL and SYD is so huge that there are flights every 15 minutes at peak morning and late afternoon on both QF and VA and again some of these on large A330s. On some days QF alone has ~ 40 flights per day. YYZ-YUL has about 18 daily on AC and 13 on WS (6 of which on Encore). So maybe around 30 flights per day on aircraft ranging from 75 seats to about 140 seats.

:drunk:

AC has 20 flights tomorrow from YYZ-YUL, three are on widebody aircraft. They also have an additional 15 flights from YTZ.

you don't need 2 cities of similar size or strength to have good numbers.

No US cities in the top 10 busiest routes.

The fact is that Australia is even more isolated and urban than Canada. Their top 6 , 15M , out of 23M total in 2016. 65%

our top 6, 17M, out of 36M, +-50%

State of Victoria , 6.4M
Melbourne 4.1M
Geelong 157k

they don't have cities in between like we have in Canada. Geelong is like Trois-Rivières. The traffic between Montréal and Quebec City is important, we don't need to trade with Toronto all the time. Ottawa is just an hour away, New York 6hrs, and Boston 5-6hrs, by car.

Yup and another difference is the dominance of both Sydney and Melbourne when it comes to commerce in Australia. In Canada the second largest commercial city wouldn’t even come close to Toronto’s dominance. It’s quite a unique relationship in Australia.

Very few countries in the world have the top two so close together.
MEL-SYD is even larger than São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

The US is far too diverse to have any true dominating city pairs.

As for the volume of flights from YTZ-YUL those are all on aircraft less than 80 seats as well as a lot of the YYZ-YUL flights. I believe some of the widebody flights are international through flights to places like Geneva and Brussels or repositioning for intl ops. I only see 18 flights listed on AC.com regardless.

As for international I would also say in Canada YVR also punches WAY above its weight. YTD through November total international exceeds YUL by over 1,000,000 pax. That gap will most likely widen for total 2017 when December numbers come out. MEL for example will be about 10.35 million for calendar YTD for 2017.

I lived in the Ottawa Valley for a few years (in the 1990s) and use to fly Pem-Air from Pembroke to Toronto fairly regularly. It was expensive. I could never justify it on a personal level. Had no problem justifying it a business expensive given how much cheaper it was vrs the extra labour costs of driving. This is not something new.

That was back in a time when airlines would restrict the cheapest flights to having a Saturday night stay over etc. Today those restrictions are gone on domestic flights.

The airlines has to make a judgment call. Can it make more with a smaller aircraft flying just the passengers willing to pay a premium or does it make more money lowering the prices and having more passengers.

YUL-YYZ isn't even Air Canada's busiest route, by passenger traffic it is YYZ-YVR. While some days frequencies might be higher on YUL-YYZ, the aircraft used on YVR-YYZ is much larger and as a result, total pax numbers are higher

Due to US numbers only. And again, same reasons. YVR is relatively isolated compared to the major US cities. No choice but to fly if you want to go further than the States of Washington and Oregon. Remove the US, and YVR's international numbers drop by half.

Montrealers are within a 6 hr driving distance of several large US metro areas and a US population basin of over 40 million people.

While I do agree that YVR punches above its weight for international numbers, let's face it, those numbers are mostly concentrated to the US and China. YUL has a more diverse international network.