Originally Posted by
cirrusdragoon
It all has to start somewhere, someone has to and will make the first move. If Westjet wants to tap the business market segment , bold and sometimes expensive moves have to be made.
Plenty of businesspeople in YYC are happy to take WS to LGW if London is their destination. Your personal preference for LHR does not mean that no business travellers want to go to LGW.
The beauty of it all . Just because they have not tapped the full potential of certain partnerships yet does not mean they will not. Neither myself nor anyone else has a crystal ball for what lies ahead. It is a wonderful thing to watch a flower bloom.
WS's track record suggests it will be a long time, if ever, before these partnerships generate much traffic.
In the meantime, they would just be burning money to fly to LHR instead of LGW. That's not smart business sense, nor is it consistent with WS's philosophy.
Originally Posted by
hollywoodcory17
Just thought I'd post an update. In this weeks OAG filing, WS has now removed YYC/YYZ-LGW until June 5th. Should hit the booking system by tonight. No LHR fillings yet.
Still not selling any YYC-LHR flights though, only LGW. I think it's highly unlikely the slots will be used this summer.
That year was the one summer where all three of those airlines (AC/BA and WS) had J class service on YYC-LON, all of them had good LF's. Even TS had good loads too. I've heard mixed reasonings on why BA reduced back to seasonal from poor load factors, to the RR engines, to even a BA employee mentioning they didn't want to pay for deicing? (Could have been a mix of all of those factors). BA only cancelled the route a few months ago but I imagine they will be back in YYC at some point in the future, just not the next few years.
BA's first pullback from YYC was definitely RR-related. They've explicitly called YYC a permanent cancellation, so I wouldn't rule out them ever coming back, but it doesn't seem likely in the next few years.
Originally Posted by
Fiordland
My guess is AC and WS will be back on the route. Who knows about Transat. But I think BA is done. If WS can get the slots for nothing, they should do Heathrow it gives them more options for onward connections.
Originally Posted by
Fiordland
Heathrow gives WS the most long-term options where they can fill the aircraft with both connecting and local traffic. Despite the fact it is an evil airport to make connections at, it just has so many options. However that is dependent on WS finding someone in their organizations that can get these deals done.
It only gives them options for onward connections if they have the partnerships though. There aren't a lot of people buying separate tickets to self-connect when they can so easily purchase a single ticket from other airlines.
I don't know that it's about getting deals done, I think it's more about implementing the deals, deepening them, and actually making something of them. They already have partnerships with AF and KL that they're not doing much with. As I've pointed out upthread, WS won't sell you a ticket to many of the places that those airlines fly. Rather than dicking around at LHR and trying to sign something with VS, they should figure out what they need to do to leverage the network that they're already sort-of part of. That may mean joining the SkyTeam TATL JV, which would take some time, but what they
have done to date suggests there should be scope to do a lot more without getting there (e.g. they can sell me YYC-CDG-DUS, why not YYC-CDG-BER?).
None of that requires flying to Heathrow anytime soon.