OAG (the world's premier airline statistics source) has released its 2024 route data, which covers a ton of specific categories (ie. ranking seats by sector and by region across the highest airport pairings). They publish a report ever year, but from looking at past reports, the methodology and categorization changes year to year. For instance, this year's report seems to only measure by seats (ie. measure flight frequency
and aircraft capacity). In years past, they have used just # of flights as a rank. So it is hard to compare to years past without doing some cross referencing and deep aircraft research. This year they also changed their categorization, namely they now have a "North America" category which consists of Canada and the US (Mexico is in with "Latin America", I am not sure about Caribbean or how they split it?). In past OAG year end reports, they treated anything non-US as International, but this year it is unclear whether they] consider Canadian routes to the US as "domestic"? It's unclear because although there are no Canada-US route pairs in the top 10 of the "domestic routes by region", hard to tell if that's because the routes didn't count, or because none ranked in the top 10...
However, two Canadian routes made the top 10 busiest domestic pairings in North America (reminder, by seats).
And one of those routes is the #1 busiest route in Canada AND the US I couldn't believe it, I had to triple check to make sure it wasn't a mis-read. Sure enough, YVR-YYZ was the #1 domestic route overall, with 3,498,835 seats. It came ahead of #2, ATL-ORL (3,474,713 and a route generally considered to be the biggest domestic pairing in the US). #3 is HNL-OGG, another perennial heavy hitter that obviously has suffered due to Maui's natural disaster and slipped from #1 in 2023. The rest of the top 10 consists of major airport pairs:
4. LAS-LAX
5. DEN-PHX
6. LAX-SFO
7. JFK-LAX
8. LGA-ORD
9. ATL-FLL
Then at #10, just squeezing in, is YVR-YYC (2,960,192 seats). It is pretty cool to see a domestic Canadian route at #1 and beating out so many iconic pairing like JFK-LAX. And then to have a 2nd entry in the top, so nice to see representation, and an important measure giving us in context to so many airports and routes we discuss (they only post Top 10 airports in the public release, not sure if there's more there with paid subscription). So congrats to YVR, YYC, and YYZ for making it on the list! And special mention of course to YVR for being part of both routes, including #1.
Honourable mentions go to Canadian airports making a showing in other categories:
-CUN-YYZ was the 8th largest Latin American international route (1,365,176 seats)
-YUL-CDG was the 6th largest international route from North America (1,515,224), and the only route in the top 10 from Canada to international, the rest were from the US
-Globally, we are still in the minor leagues lol, the numbers you see on some Asian domestic and International routes is insane, like 14+ million on a domestic pairing like JEJ-GMP (Jeju to Seoul Gimpo in South Korea). That's insane capacity. And strong showings from airports like CAI, who have impressive numbers (ie. CAI to Jeddah with 5.5 million seats, plus lots more). But Canada has a big selection of well connected airports, domestically, internationally, and especially to the US. These rankings are measuring a specific thing, they don't take in overall strength of an airport, just raw numbers by pairing. Just nice to see us on there at all
https://www.oag.com/busiest-routes-world-2024
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The performance of the A220 is not a shock, it has a good capacity for domestic and transborder. I had posted over the weekend about how YVR being dominated by 737s and its higher capacity might be responsible for frequency losses (ie. YVR-YYC & YEG), as well as having to mix mainline and Jazz to get capacity in line. Maybe with the 220 bases, they won't have to put Jazz on routes like YVR to YEG, YYC, LAX, or PHX. I can't say I'm excited about Rouge coming back here, but I guess it makes sense financially with the soon-to-be upgraded fleet and the routes. I hope they don't go back to their initial YVR days when they switched everything to Rouge including routes like SFO and LAX, and that was a mistake. But I get how many routes make sense on Rouge (ie. Mexico, FLL, even Maui), so let's see how this plays out... The new routes are just dreams at this point, but let's hope some materialize for YUL, YYZ, and YVR. The Asian routes are optimistic, and they all seem likely only from YVR. But all the South America, Europe, and Africa routes could easily be YYZ or YUL, it's anyone's guess if they divide equally or give one more than the other (recently it has been a feast for YUL but less so for YYZ, so that could continue or not). Sad that YVR to South America seems just as distant as before, not being within the range of the 321XL is a real killer, that plane could have been our game changer, but it isn't physically realistic 
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