Quote:
Originally Posted by MonctonRad
Six flights daily to Halifax and essentially no flights anywhere else at all. The other destinations are all seasonal.
It's the "hub & spoke system" run amok. To get anywhere else in the world, you have to transfer at Halifax Stanfield.
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Precisely. And since this is how it works through the season where Air Canada still retains their monopoly, their prices go up and it's more cost effective to fly in/out of Halifax, rent a car for the week, and drive to/from Halifax for your flights (5 hours each way). How do I know? i did this exact thing last Christmas. Hopefully Westjet will bring their regional service into Sydney to offer year-round competition. I know from their past comments to the business community that this is on their radar, but there's been nothing close to a firm commitment or even a strong hint that this will happen...
...yet.
If it wasn't for the airport authority actively attracting airlines to increase competition, JA Douglas McCurdy Airport would have gone the way of Yarmouth Airport. Air Canada was pricing themselves out of the market.
I broke my rule and flew with Air Canada this summer...huge mistake! I had window seats pre-booked and confirmed for every leg of the flight (5 in total there and back)...I got 2. Every single flight was delayed...both ways...and sadly this is not an exaggeration (I wish it was). Not to mention the flight that was leaving Sydney to Toronto was fully booked, but AC decided to fly a smaller jet from Toronto to Sydney anyway, meaning that not everybody could get on the flight to Toronto despite having confirmed reservations beforehand. I was lucky and got on the flight to Toronto, those who didn't had to wait 6 hours to fly standby on a flight to Montreal (which oddly doesn't show in the schedule but was flying this day) and have connections arranged through there. Why not the 6 flights to Halifax, some of which would have left earlier? They were full too, as was Westjet's 737 to Toronto. It's well known that Air Canada doesn't really want to be in Sydney, but they have no good case for leaving unless they can decrease their passenger loads out of there to an unsustainable level. Hell, they were flying glorified crop dusters out of there until real competition showed up, and still do sometimes in the "off season". I'm not talking Dash 8's that some don't seem to like, I'm talking the single prop 12 seater's.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SignalHillHiker
It'll probably change eventually. I remember having to touch down in Halifax on a lot of flights out of St. John's, even to Europe, until relatively recently (say, within the last 10 years).
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Air Canada used to have direct flights from Sydney to Newfoundland...but it wasn't St. John's. Nope. It was Stephenville. Now tell me how that made any sense. To get to St. John's, you had to connect in Halifax (or I suppose Stephenville if they had a flight from there). And taking the Argentia was a heck of a lot cheaper and didn't take a whole lot of extra time.
Anyway, that's enough ranting for one day...
You guys are right, the growth is impressive and really shows the latent demand that has always existed in the Sydney market, but even now there's latent demand still between mid-October to mid-May (58% of the year).