On Saturdays, AC in summer out of YVR are flying some sun routes with widebodies. For example, this summer, the 789 YVR-YOW flight, instead of daily is X6 and will be flown with a MAX on day 6 as the aircraft will be used on YVR-CUN on Saturdays. Wouldn't be surprised if something similar is happening on the BOS route where the aircraft is being assigned to a Saturday-only service.

On a separate AC note, they're going to be re-instating YEG-YZF in June: https://simpleflying.com/air-canada-...s-summer-2023/

Well, now you are talking about Sunday cruises. Zahav said Saturday was a big cruise day and wondered why AC didn't run the flight on Saturday. If there are cruises on Sunday, and if a person from Boston wanted to sail on it, and if the AC flight was still the preferred option, they could likely as easily come in Friday as Saturday. That's what I would do. We took an afternoon flight to LA for a cruise departing the next day and my body clock was out of whack, as I was awake wandering the halls of the hotel at 3am. Not sure I would have really enjoyed a redeye flight back though. Hard to enjoy being a tourist with luggage in tow, even if you do those tours the cruise lines run for those with late flights. I would probably get a hotel anyway, so if I was doing that, I would try to find a morning flight the next morning if there wasn't an early afternoon flight the day the cruise arrived.

I was implying the Saturday BOS flight will fly to YOW instead. No other morning MAX route have x6, and the plane with sub-daily morning departure will fly to MIA on Saturday.

I thought we were talking Jetblue. Yes, AC is likely looking at connecting traffic onward to Australia or Asia.

When I have been on the Newark to Vancouver flight I have always found there is a lot of people with Australian ascents. No idea what percentage are connecting on to Australia/NZ.

That would be late evening into Vancouver and morning departure out of Vancouver.

It has been a few years since I had done a cruise, when I did them more frequently it was out of Europe. Would fly in a few days before and if possible try to get a noon flight back out the same day the cruise ended. But that is just me.

I checked the ship schedule in Vancouver. Last year it looks like Tuesday and Thursday were the dead days for ships in port. Monday was a bit slower but there were ships in ports some weeks. Not certain about 2023.

https://www.portvancouver.com/wp-con...s-of-Aug-4.pdf

Yeah, I was looking at another website with cruise port timetables but I couldn't tell which are home ports and which were port of calls on a given day.

We used to always drive to Detroit or Toronto, spend the night there, then fly to the port city the day ahead of the cruise. Last cruise, I said to my wife "why are we spending a night in a hotel in the cold? Let's just take an afternoon flight and spend 2 nights in Ft Lauderdale." I much preferred doing that.

Vancouver and Seattle as nearly always home ports. Those are the only two setup with the logistics infrastructure to provision the ships.

I know the fellow that handles a lot of the provisioning in Victoria and it tends to be limited to things they have run low on mid cruise before returning to Seattle. The Victoria stop is mostly there for compliance with US regulations to prohibit foreign ships from operating purely domestic passenger service.

That is what I would do.

What I mean is the timetable page I looked at didn't differentiate whether a ship was in Vancouver because it was only a port of call visit rather than home porting and switching passengers. I'm assuming a certain amount of those ships are only visiting, and not ending a cruise. I know a lot of cruises run out of Vancouver to do the one way northbound or end the one way southbound cruises to/from Alaska due to not legally being able to do those from the US.

Starting from Jan 31 until the end of winter season at least, AC will route all passengers to China via YVR.

AC 25/26 YVR-PVG will increase to 4x weekly non-stop
AC 27/28 YYZ-PVG will be suspended

From application to CAAC, AC intend to restart YVR-ICN-PEK starting early Feb, but reservation is not yet available for the route.

Ah ok. Makes sense for the swap as both routes are similar stage lengths. Obviously there’s way more O&D on YVR-YOW than YVR-BOS. 2020 & 21 aside you’d have to go back to the mid-90s for the last time AC ran YVR-YOW only 2x on Saturdays in summer.

Mid 90s I was regularly doing YVR-YOW. Back then it was two non-stops (morning and late afternoon) on the A320 then there was usually a mid-day DC-9 that stopped in Winnipeg. The DC-9 in economy you got a hot meal on both legs. You only got one meal on the non-stop. Usually I would score an open middle seat on the A320, the DC-9 was always packed.

CP/Canadian back then also had parallel flights on 737.

That was a different time.

I was delayed on Dec. 16 for a flight from YOW to YWG. Flight was supposed to leave at 3:00 pm (I think), ended up leaving at 10:30 pm. It was first delayed for a couple of hours due to the weather (that was the day Ottawa got it's first substantial snowstorm). Sat on the tarmac for 1.5 hrs, waited for them to de-ice the gate, and waited for a few hours inside the airport for the crews to fix a mechanical problem (the lights on the left wing were not fuctioning). So many entitled assholes demanding refunds. WTF, you want to fly in a plane with non-functioning equipment? Piss off.

Landed in Winnipeg at 1:40 am, alive.

Yep after the pandemic,so far Vancouver YVR to Asia flights has seen more increased airline frequencies & is leading the way compared to Toronto YYZ, Montreal YUL & Calgary YYC.

YVR :has a pretty good mix with Air Canada, Japan Airlines, All Nippon Airways, Air China, China Airlines, Cathay Pacific Airways, Korean Air, Philippine Airlines, Eva Air, Xiamen Airlines,Hainan Airlines, Sichuan Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Air India & now China Eastern Airlines resuming in 2023 again. That will keep growing eventually.

YYZ: Air Canada,Air India, China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines, Korean Air, Cathay Pacific Airways, Eva Air & Philippine Airlines. Foreign airlines have more Asia frequencies at YYZ compared to AC currently.

YUL - Air Canada to Tokyo NRT, Japan & Delhi,India only currently.

YYC - WestJet to Tokyo NRT, Japan & starting end of April 2023.
The 1st nonstop to Asia from YYC (since end of 2019).

^ TLV, AMM, DOH, DXB, AUH, are all in Asia as well....

AC, El Al, Royal Jordanian, Emirates, Qatar, Etihad, all serve these destinations, from either YYZ or YUL, or in some cases, both.

AC doesn't seem too eager to add a bunch of capacity to China right away. Neither do Chinese airlines to Canada, for that matter. Fleet and/or crewing issues perhaps..

Sunwing XLD the rest of the season to YQR
But seems to be doing only a couple flights after Feb 4

YXE Chamber of Commerce not happy about WS now having a monopoly on YXE-YYC: https://www.newswire.ca/news-release...841328428.html

Canada had not approved any additional frequency by Chinese airline so far. They'll probably take their time into the summer season. Not sure if new bilateral is needed since the previous one was ignored by the Chinese side for the last few years?

As far AC, I doubt they can just come up with spare plane for the rest of winter season for additional frequency. The current change is simply converting the 2x weekly YYZ-ICN-PVG into YYZ-YVR-PVG with the YVR-YYZ leg sold separately, similar to the SYD flight.

AC got CAAC approval for 1x weekly YVR-ICN-PEK for potential YVR departure on Fridays, which likely would rotate with the HKG flight which is x5 for winter. They probably can't fit anything else with the current schedule.

As for summer season and beyond, they can probably move some schedule around for a few additional frequency to China, but most likely they'll route most traffic to YVR due to airspace restriction. I doubt they would have the resource to detour around Russia, especially for YYZ-PEK. Currently summer schedule is not updated yet, but they'll definitely change.

Check out Flair's S23 aircraft scheduling and in orange where there are still holes to fill: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...gid=1120481158

The latest iteration of the Canada-China bilateral, which recently came into force (June 2022), says each country has the right to 76 weekly flights in each direction. That's 1x weekly frequency shy of 11 daily flights each way.

This being said, it's totally understandable that Canada will not grant China all those frequencies until they reciprocate.

That sounds the same as the 2014 version of the bilateral.

Each side will have 76x weekly flights to 12 destinations.

Link to the 2014 version of the bilateral posted on CAAC (Chinese) site, since it was not posted by Canada.
http://www.caac.gov.cn/XXGK/XXGK/SBG...0117693092.pdf