Originally Posted by
cedric
Fares aside, since they're not consistently better or worse - the Porter PY experience is subpar compared to the Westjet Premium experience when it has the proper cabin, and about equal to the Westjet Premium experience when it has the transformation cabin.
I guess you could book Porter PY simply out of spite, but there's still a roughly 85% chance of having a better experience on Westjet.
It doesn't matter if you "know exactly what you're getting" what that's always consistently equal to or worse than the alternative.
You can't really look at it as "fares aside".
Porter's product is a premium economy, and they price it as a premium economy.
WestJet's product is a domestic J ... that they (for some reason that's always escaped me) insist on calling it "premium economy" even though they price as a domestic J.
I took a random (really!) date - Tuesday Feb 18 - and compared AC, PD and WS on a one-way segment from YYC - YYZ ... a route where all three airlines offer non-stop service. (The date just happened to be the one that showed up when I hopped on to WestJet's site, probably based on a previous search ... although it wasn't for YYC-YYZ)
Here are the results, with the lowest available fares:
Porter:
Economy = $183,
"Porter Reserve" = $314
Air Canada:
Economy = $184,
Business Class = $741
WestJet:
Economy = $183.18,
Premium = $1096.68
So, if the Porter PY experience is "subpar" to what WestJet offers (and I agree) ... you'll also notice that it is priced at a small fraction of what WS is pricing their, ahem, PY product at. $314 to $1097 is a pretty big price difference.
If I book Porter, it wouldn't be out of spite.
It would be to keep $700++ in my bank account, albeit for a product that's not quite as good as what WS or AC offer (but is still pretty good).