Originally Posted by
cirrusdragoon
Business travellers travelling on business prefer LHR .
For just going to London, it's marginal, and I say that as someone who has been to London on business many times. The value of LHR is connections.
Westjet is vying for closer ties with Virgin Atlantic , whom has recently consolidated their presence at LHR. Then there is the relationship with Air France KLM . Emirates as well does serve LHR . The two are current codeshare partners already. Many possibilities. It is certainly going to be an interesting next few years.
Originally Posted by
hollywoodcory17
WestJet recently signed a codeshare agreement with VS that they could in theory expand for connecting options through LHR?
WS's partnerships are an absolute joke. They made much fanfare of the AF/KL codeshare agreement and the connections that would enable. They talked about the YYC-CDG flight offering connectivity to AF's great network.
But here we are, years later, and as far as the WS website goes, BER, CPH, ARN, ZAG, WAW, NAP, FLR, MAD, MAN, EDI, GLA, and most other places in Europe simply don't exist.
And if you try to book through, say, KL, good luck finding options with the TATL legs on WS.
Signing a codeshare agreement means little unless there's an agreement on inventory sharing, joint fares, etc. On that front, it certainly doesn't help WS that it's not on the TATL JV with DL, AF/KL, VS, and AZ.
But the bottom line is that WS has signed many partnerships over the years that have had very little impact on options for the passenger.
If they actually do something with VS and/or some other partners with sizeable presence at LHR, maybe LHR will make sense for WS. But I'm skeptical, based on what they've done (or not) in the past.
Its clear they really want in, and I guess time will tell whether they choose to keep these slots and use them or return them like they did back in the winter.
I don't know that it's clear they
really want in. As far as I know, they haven't had to commit any money to these slots, so all it has cost them is a bit of time to file the applications and whatnot.