Originally Posted by Adam Smith

Mining companies.

One company might be able to justify an RJ somewhere - there was talk that Potash Corp. used to subsidize YXE-ORD so its executives could travel conveniently between its two main offices. But long-haul routes cost many millions of dollars a year to run. As a finance guy with extensive experience in international business, it's difficult to conceive a rational business case for funding a route like that.

I used to do tons of business in Colombia, and one of my peers and I at another company once mused about trying to get AC to operate a YYC-BOG route so we could stop connecting in IAH/YYZ/DFW/etc, and even with each company booking hundreds of trips a year, it made no sense.

Even if you just run a 789 4x weekly, there's 6,240 J seats, 4,368 PY seats, and 51,376 Y seats per year. A company sending 10 people a week on a route is accounting for 520 seats per year, which is <10% of the J cabin. If the airline needs 80%+ load factor to break even, who's going to buy all those other seats?

And I highly doubt Scotia was sending 10 people per week specifically on the YYZ-SCL route (which could include locals coming to head office as well as head office folks going down). Even before the Zoom revolution.



The examples you cited are massive global companies far bigger than anything we have here. They're also sectors where there are a lot of suppliers clustered together - e.g. DTW gets a lot of international traffic not just from the Big 3, but also from suppliers and other people in the business shuttling around. I doubt Daimler or anyone would have had to subsidize a FRA-DTW route, and given DTW is a pretty big city, I would be surprised if LH hadn't been running that route even before the Daimler-Chysler tie-up.

Scotia's Chilean operations don't have a ton of Canadian suppliers going down all the time.