Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
The main point is that until recently there weren't good direct flights between Canada's 2 coastal regions, hence Canada had poorer coast-to-coast connectivity than the USA.
YHZ doesn't just serve metro Halifax, nor is YVR just Vancouver. The Maritimes have over 2 million people.
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Indeed, but one can get a flight direct to multiple Maritime cities by connecting in Toronto and Montreal. Outside of Halifax, one is driving several hours if they're not from there. One has to weigh the cost/benefit ratio for that.
In the case of Westjet, they've long been doing Halifax-Calgary. This is in contrast to pushing onwards to Vancouver because airlines generally don't overfly their primary hubs.
Airlines tend to like routing through hubs to smaller destinations until the destination can support demand reliably. Air Canada - with its fairly strong network in Canada - probably has their finger on the pulse of demand well and it recognized a weakness. Great for Halifax, but the couple of direct flights to Vancouver probably aren't going to mean much in the grand scheme of things.
Sure, the coast-to-coast thing is weaker here, but it makes sense given our relatively dispersed, smaller coastal cities on the Atlantic. Comparing demand from the US Northeast mega-region to California seems kind of unfair.
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