Westjet Restores Service To Atlantic Canadian Airports
HALIFAX—WestJet is restoring service to the Atlantic Canadian airports it dropped during Covid-19.
The airline announced today it is bringing flights back to Charlottetown, Fredericton, Moncton, Sydney, and Quebec City. The flights, which were cancelled in November, will all return over the final week in June.
WestJet is also brining back its previously suspended flight between St. John’s and Toronto and pushing up the resumption of flights between St. John’s and Halifax to May 6.
The St. John’s-to-Halifax flight will run six times a week; flights between Sydney and Halifax will run once a week; flights between Charlottetown and Toronto will take off 11 times each week.
The other returning flights, which are all between Atlantic Canadian cities and Toronto, will run once every week. WestJet will also bring back seasonal flights in Deer Lake and Gander according to its usual schedule.
John Weatherill is WestJet’s executive vice president and chief commercial officer.
Speaking to the media March 24, he said the returning Atlantic Canadian flights will put WestJet back in all 42 cities it operated out of prior to the pandemic.
However, he noted that WestJet is still operating at only a fraction of its pre-pandemic capacity. Across the country, and in Atlantic Canada, WestJet is running at about 10 percent of its pre-pandemic levels.
He said it will “take time” to build back to its former capacity, which WestJet plans to do with several steps. Today’s announcement was one of those steps.
Weatherill said WestJet feels comfortable starting that process because governments are beginning to wrestle Covid-19 under control. With vaccine programs ramping up, the airline is anticipating looser travel restrictions in the coming months.
“As we look ahead to the recovery, we do have more optimism now than we did back in November. Thanks to an accelerated vaccine rollout we see a path to the safe restart of travel in this country,” he said.
As those restrictions are eased (which he admits is still not guaranteed), Weatherill said WestJet expects demand for travel to be “very high.”
“A lot of Canadians… for more than a year now have been unable to see their friends and family,” he said “We don’t need to convince people to travel. They want to travel once the services are there and available for them.”
Monette Pasher is the executive director of the Atlantic Canada Airports Association. She says that, even at reduced capacity, airlines returning to Atlantic Canadian airports is fantastic for the region.
“Today’s news is very encouraging. Overall, it’s a great day for Atlantic Canada,” Pasher said.
She pointed out that WestJet was down to a “skeleton crew” in the region thanks to the pandemic and that restoring its service here is a “leap of faith that Atlantic Canada will reopen to fellow Canadians this summer.”
Andrew Gibbons, WestJet’s director of government relations, said the company is seeing “positive signs from the Atlantic region.”
“The Premiers have made some statements publicly about their commitment to restart, and the importance of restarting safely, so we’re encouraged by that,” he said.
However, he said Covid-19 is “a fluid situation” so it’s impossible to predict what the coming months might look like.
“What we can do today is unveil a responsible plan… And that’s what we’re doing,” he said.
Pasher pointed out that health officials generally haven’t said the region will stay closed for the summer and said WestJet’s faith in the region opening is a “positive sign there could be a window of opportunity for a summer, which be so huge for our tourism industry and people who want to reconnect with family and friends.”
Weatherill said health restrictions and demand will ultimately decide what flights WestJet offers. However, the company is already planning to increase the number of flights across Canada, and internationally, over the summer.
Included in that plan are three trans-Atlantic flights leaving Halifax’s Stanfield International Airport.
“We remain very hopeful that some of the international travel restrictions will be reduced and removed in due course. And so as with everything we’re planning for that eventuality,” he said. “We’ll adjust as we need to but at this point it is our intention to fly internationally this summer.”