Stranger

Nannies?

Adam Smith

It's an interesting question. If there truly are 35,000 people going between the two cities annually, and most of them are connecting to the YVR-MNL flight, perhaps it could actually make some sense to switch one flight a week from YVR-MNL to YWG-MNL. Especially if YWG were to throw some nice subsidies at the airline for doing it. Government money got AC to BNE, after all, when all logic suggested MEL was a better destination.

CloudsBelow

LOL. Well played

Besides, I remember reading YEG was close to snagging non-stop to MNL.

InTheAirGuy

Wow. Winnipeg beat Edmonton over something.

Isn't this like the thread of losers? Winnipeg? Manila? What type of drugs are they doing at the CBC these days?

CloudsBelow

There is no sense or logic for a profit-seeking airline to fly non-stop between Winnipeg and Manilla

Jasper2009

According to wikipedia, 9% of Winnipeg's population are of Filipino descent, so yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if there were 10k-20k pax ex-YWG per year.

However, between 40% of Winnipeg's population being of British or German descent, some business travel and and tourism to Europe, I'm still surprised the O/D to MNL supposedly exceeds the O/D traffic to LHR, for instance (not to mention LHR is a huge hub while MNL isn't)

Stranger

Wow, must be because they enjoy the weather.

Stranger

Just when I refrained from posting that....

Don't rub it in. please.

drvannostren

Lol, westjet won't be flying to the Phillipines unless it's a beach resort. I can't see this happening, or IF they did it'd be a pricey once weekly. Connecting in YVR is very easy, it's not gonna add much travel time, the biggest concern to me for someone going YWG-MNL is the fact that there's nothing at YVR that comes in late from YWG for people to connect to PR or the other late night Asian flights. So they actually end up going YWG-YEG-YVR-MNL.

But again, not judging the people involved, this is going to be a very price sensitive flight. The Filipinos I know are exactly like the guy in the video, they go once or twice a year, strictly for family, they calculate all the costs out well in advance, including their overweight baggage fees. The woman with the 2 kids, sure she'd prefer to fly direct since the kids won't have to make connections either, but is she willing to pay 200-500$ more for the direct flight? I doubt it.

What would the business traffic be as well?

I think what WOULD work, would be YWG-YVR-MNL all on PR (or someone else, but the PR flight already exists). Last time I looked that PR flight was used for 5th freedom rights to fly YVR-LAS during it's down time mid day. That flight simply isn't needed. There's enough seats to Vegas without adding a 340 (I think they use a 777 now) they had some pretty rock bottom prices from time to time but I just don't see a need for it. If there's that many Filipinos in YWG, then why not pick them up? The stop in YVR would have to be about 60 minutes to fuel and load the pax/bags, but since their bags wouldn't have to be offloaded making this type of connection really is just getting off the plane (or not) and hanging out. No need to haul stuff around and walk your baby 3/4 across an airport. No need for them to have 5th freedom on this either, but I think either WS would have to add a late arriving YWG-YVR flight or better still would be to just have PR run the whole route themselves. You could even do it selectively, you could do the YWG run 2x 3x a week while keeping YVR daily (or whatever it's at now, which might only be 5-6 a week).

Jasper2009

If I recall correctly, the numbers are quite similar for both Edmonton and Calgary and the number of Filipino immigrants has been exploding over the last years.

pewpew

Pfft, YWG is laaaame

Adam Smith

It's so nice when people make blanket statements without bothering to analyse the facts or add anything substantive to the discussion.

The difference is that for most of the people of British or German descent, that's long in the past (grandparents, great-grandparents, etc), whereas I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of YWG's Filipinos are fairly recent immigrants who are much more likely to return to their homeland (or have visitors coming from there) than someone whose family came over from Germany in 1908 is to return to Germany.

I'm not saying a YWG-MNL is a slam dunk, just that I can see why it could be a possibility.

Jasper2009

Fair enough, I'm not sure what criteria were used, but the list also mentions "Canadian" as an ethnic origin.

Not sure about the population of British descent, but there was a huge wave of immigrants from Germany in the 1950s, and there's still a large German community in Winnipeg (the same is true for Edmonton). Many 2nd generation German-Canadians travel back to Germany regularly and there's a rather active German community which includes culture clubs, German lawyers, doctors, churches, bilingual schools etc.

I'm not questioning the 35,000 pax figure, I'm just surprised LHR (for instance) isn't higher since there are business pax and tourists (which I would have assumed to amount to a few 10k pax per year) in addition to immigrants.

Adam Smith

You make good points and I agree with what you've said, although wasn't aware that there had been that much German immigration so recently. So I think we're generally in agreement.

Stranger

Actually that does not sound right. 9% of the visible minority population sounds more likely. It looks like Filipino minorities in Calgary is less than 3%.

As a percentage of visible minorities they represent about 8% in Toronto, 9% in Vancouver, 4% in Montreal, 11% in Calgary and Edmonton.