Originally Posted by
drvannostren
I think you laid out a lot of the reasons why it wouldn't exist. I think the other problem is ZAG itself, there's very little connecting traffic in or out. Despite Croatian being hubbed there, you're almost always gonna route through MUC FRA LHR or MAYBE WAW to get back across the pond. I was trying to cross all the STAR airlines off (still am, I'll be done early next year) and I was surprised at how hard it was to get some of them. Like Croatian, Aegean and Adria...none of them are really feeder airlines it seems, or they don't try to be. LH takes all that over. So it would literally have to be like all O/D traffic.
You still have ZAD, SPU and DBV as Zagreb connections, and Canadian/American cities as potential YYZ connections. Many cities with large Croatian population (eg. Cleveland and Pittsburgh) require two stops to/from ZAG, so at least there would be good connections on the YYZ side.
I totally agree that OU is not a good airline. Lower quality than LH, OS, BA etc, and you can't even compare to LX. But, for someone trying to get to Dubrovnik (or another Central European city), they don't really care about the service on a 50 minute flight. They also aren't feeders; 4x weekly to LHR is a joke, as is Q400 to MUC. But you would never fly YYZ-ZAG-LHR anyway, so that doesn't matter.
I still agree that objectively it would mostly be YYZ-ZAG passengers and wouldn't gather many connecting traffic, but Rouge still flies to ZAG. The only difference would be a 6-7% capacity increase, put towards more premium cabin space. So objectively, the only change is passenger experience, the addition of a (not huge) J cabin, and a 7% capacity increase. Seems like a reasonable change to me