Quote:
Originally Posted by sa226
I think one of the things the airlines are desperately trying to figure out is how to balance the unprecedented accessibility of air travel these days with the lucrative business travel market.
There are people who think that 250$ is expensive for a round trip to Vancouver, and those people are now flooding terminals ready to travel again. So now you see airlines like Flair, Swoop, Lynx, Canada Jetlines and who knows who else saturating the market.
Westjet spent 5 years trying to establish a hub and spoke model to feed international wide body expansion, but when people stop flying, and business travellers start meeting on Zoom those 787s just flush dolla bills down the toilet. Now they are retreating to the west to regroup in the face of staffing issues. Westjet was a low cost model and has been trying to dip their toe in the business market. Air Canada is a traditional legacy carrier and dipped their toe in the low cost market with Rouge. The pandemic caused Westjet to retreat and pause 787 expansion, and it caused Air Canada to park their low cost arm.
It's all crazy when you think about it, all of these hotshot CEOs and upstart airlines come in guns a blazing with their busines plans, yet they are all just trying to capture a fickle market of traveller's. Millions of Canadians would sit on a milk crate for 8 hours to Rome is it meant they saved 5 bucks on their fare. Yet the Canadian government uses airports like their personal ATMs and NAV CANADA continues to charge crazy fees.
That was all pretty rambly, all that being said, everyone is looking singularity for someone to blame for the current state of the Air Travel industry, when you can pretty much blame everyone, top to bottom. Government to Airlines to contractors. The next 10 years are going to be very interesting
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International overseas travel is really lucrative for airlines. That’s why Air Canada tries to really market international flights to Americans with stopovers to Toronto or Montreal on their way to Europe. Thats what makes them a lot money, not flying someone from Calgary to Vancouver or Toronto. Business class is the other way airlines make a ton of money, that can apply to any flight, but especially overseas flights.
I agree with your post, lots of people these days think it should cost a few hundred bucks to fly. I personally think airlines will be changing their model - increasing prices to account for fuel and the inevitable pay raises for staff in order to bring more stability to their airline. Right now, they can’t attract and keep front line staff. Hard to change that with cheap tickets.