Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport (YOW/CYOW) 1.0

[MountainView]

Originally Posted by McC

Not sure about Canadian North, but First Air does Ottawa-Iqaluit-Rankin-Yellowknife

You are correct I just looked it up. Canadian North offers a connection in Iqaluit with different place service. Their flight also goes through Rankin Inlet.

[eemy]

Does this make Victoria the only provincial/territorial capital without service from Ottawa? I loved Whitehorse when I visited, and if you can make your way to Dawson City and the Tombstone Mountains as well, I strongly recommend a visit.

[MountainView]

Originally Posted by jeremy_haak

Does this make Victoria the only provincial/territorial capital without service from Ottawa? I loved Whitehorse when I visited, and if you can make your way to Dawson City and the Tombstone Mountains as well, I strongly recommend a visit.

During the summer Air Canada offers same plane/flight number service through Toronto to Victoria. So technically it is a 'direct' destination, just not non-stop.

[rocketphish]

Airport improvement fees up 15 per cent in March

By Carys Mills, OTTAWA CITIZEN January 14, 2014 6:00 PM

OTTAWA — Airport improvement fees added to every passenger’s airline ticket will go up by 15 per cent on March 1.

The fees, $20 at the moment, will rise to $23, said airport spokeswoman Krista Kealey, adding the last increase was in 2011.

The money goes toward capital improvement projects, such as the new terminal building and runway reconstruction.

“It’s anything that’s a major capital project,“ Kealey said. She said the increase was advertised in December and so far there hasn’t been feedback from customers. It’s difficult to compare to U.S. airport funding and predict passenger reaction, she said.

“We are building critical infrastructure without any support from the federal government or any other levels of government,“ she said. “We do our best to provide the best customer experience possible and part of that means creating new infrastructure.“

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Airport+improvement+fees+cent+March/9385872/story.html

[1overcosc]

Does anybody really going to get upset? Flying is so friggen expensive anyway that $3 is basically unnoticeable.

[teej1984]

This is a pie-in-the-sky dream, but wouldn't it be nice if Porter based its jet fleet out of Ottawa and ferried passengers here until a time when YTZ can be expanded? Why does everything always need to be so Toronto-centric!? It would allow them to capitalize on routes that are currently not serviced from Ottawa (LA/SF) and let Torontonians feel our pain of having to always transfer through YTZ or YYZ!

[McC]

Originally Posted by teej1984

Why does everything always need to be so Toronto-centric!?

I can think of about 5 million reasons.

[gjhall]

Originally Posted by McC

I can think of about 5 million reasons.

Primate cities theory: http://geography.about.com/od/urbaneconomicgeography/a/primatecities.htm

[McC]

I'm disappointed; that article isn't about monkeys at all.

[teej1984]

You're a tough crowd.

[phil235]

Originally Posted by gjhall

Primate cities theory: http://geography.about.com/od/urbaneconomicgeography/a/primatecities.htm

So we're not a primate-city country. Does that give us a better chance of getting the Porter jets?

[YOWflier]

Originally Posted by McC

I can think of about 5 million reasons.

One would assume this to be true, but as a matter of fact, city/metro population numbers don't factor significantly into an airline's operations.

An example of this phenomenon is Calgary (YYC), which at ~1.2M metro is a hub for both Westjet and Air Canada, and has a traffic count that is neck and neck with Montreal (YUL), which has more than triple the population at ~3.8M metro.

[McC]

Yeah, Calgary and Montreal are fun to compare and contrast; e.g., YUL barely has >4% more total traffic, but almost 4-times more (non-US) international traffic than Calgary. Very different markets!

[McC]

But I think the Calgary example actually proves how important local population and economy sizes are to hub location. Due to the size of Canada's landmass a western hub is necessary to complement Pearson, but it is a smaller hub given that the population and economy still skew east. Where do you locate that hub? looking at the numbers, Vancouver, but it's very peripheral (geographically) for running continental hub traffic efficiently (but well located for Asia-America hub traffic). So what's left? Calgary's got the highest base demand, for point-to-point service that airlines get to supplement with hub traffic, which I think makes it a more obvious choice than more-central locations in SK or MB, that have lower bases of demand to begin from.

[OTSkyline]

I'm sure the main reason for our lack of routes (and why we aren't a hub for anything) is because of our location. We are directly squished between Toronto and Montreal (both large city with large airports and economic importance), therefore not making much sense. If Ottawa was a city of 1.2 million with government but was located in the east or in Newfoundland, for example, our airport would be much bigger and important.

[YOWflier]

Originally Posted by McC

Yeah, Calgary and Montreal are fun to compare and contrast; e.g., YUL barely has >4% more total traffic, but almost 4-times more (non-US) international traffic than Calgary. Very different markets!

When one considers mainline operations to international/non-US destinations, the discrepancy between YYC and YUL is surprisingly small when considering the population/catchment area size differences. When reading "mainline", consider these as operations by full-service legacy carriers, which don't operate routes unless they can successfully achieve healthy yields. Yields are driven by full-fare/premium traffic.

YUL surpasses YYC in respect of international traffic in large part because of huge capacity in the "VFR" (Visiting Friends and Relatives) and leisure segment. This segment is driven by lower fare/highly discounted traffic.

[YowItaliano]

Looks like Ogdensburg wants a little of that Canadian pax. cross border flight departures. They basically said they wanted to lure some Ottawans to their airport for sun destinations.
I wonder if the Ottawa airport authority is nervous about this.? Also, not a good time to increase fees when competition is on the way.

[c_speed3108]

Originally Posted by YowItaliano

Looks like Ogdensburg wants a little of that Canadian pax. cross border flight departures. They basically said they wanted to lure some Ottawans to their airport for sun destinations.
I wonder if the Ottawa airport authority is nervous about this.? Also, not a good time to increase fees when competition is on the way.

Ogdensburg airport is basically an air-strip at the moment. It has parking for grand total of 51 cars. It would take a heck of a lot more than $10,000,000 to make it any serious competition.

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by c_speed3108

Ogdensburg airport is basically an air-strip at the moment. It has parking for grand total of 51 cars. It would take a heck of a lot more than $10,000,000 to make it any serious competition.

That is about what they said about Plattsburg 5+ years ago. It has seen phenomenal growth. From 100,000 passengers in 2009 it will likely reach well over 300,000 this year. While still a small number of passengers I would say that considering that this is almost all leisure travel it is still a significant loss to YUL. Ogdensburg with the proper investment could easily have an impact on Ottawa's charter business.

[MountainView]

Syracuse already takes a lot of traffic away from Ottawa. Ogdensburg would also have to compete with Syracuse as well. Their main focus should be to lure the Ottawa traffic that already drives to Syracuse to their airport as it is a much shorter distance from Ottawa.