I want to throw out a theory that could partially explain why France is more keen on adding flights than Canada. (I'm choosing France because they also only have one airline that flies to China.)

In both cases, turning up the volume entails opening the door to at least four Chinese airlines that each has the ability and interest to ramp up.

Canada has 3 o&d cities v 1 for France; fares on these invariably drop like a rock when market forces are permitted to guide business decisions.

In addition to YUL, YVR, and YYZ, AC offers connecting service to about 30 other cities, including the top 10 in the US. These routes might be lucrative enough to offset the reduced profit margins on o&d if they can scale. On the other hand, maybe that's not the case.

Meanwhile, AF has already taken the plunge, so its period of generating extremely high profits on 4 flights per week is over. The trade-off is that it is now able to connect China to its entire network (including Boston, New York, DC, Toronto, and Montreal) at scale. If they hadn't done this, they would have lost out to other European carriers. The Chinese carriers that are beating them down on China-CDG routes don't have the onward connections card.

In short, France opening up seems to be a sensible decision, and I can sort of understand why Canada's calculus could be different.



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