Originally Posted by
TravellingChris
First of all, connecting in YYZ or YUL from the U.S. to Europe is not backtracking in the same way that connecting in Canada to fly to Latin America would be. Canada is directly on the flight path for many U.S. services to Europe anyway, whereas flights to Latin America are in the complete other direction. It's as illogical to fly from the U.S. to Latin America via Canada as it would be to fly from Kuwait to Dubai via Istanbul. And no, AC's fares to Latin America are not competitive with UA's or many of the U.S. carriers.
You also completely misunderstand the point about connections. No one is saying that "many Northeast/Midwest cities in the US" are well connected to South America. However, there ARE hub airports in the United States which ARE well connected to South America and which can be easily reached by a DOMESTIC flight from the U.S. Midwest or Northeast. A domestic connecting flight will always win out for a U.S. traveler over one in a third country unless the third country airline (in this case AC) can offer a rock-bottom fare. Which, as we know from Canada's high airport taxes, fuel taxes and other levies, just ain't happening.
Not sure I agree with your reasoning here.
AC does considerable traffic from US cities to Europe and Aisa so there are a good number of people in the US who do indeed chose to connect via Canada instead of the domestic US connection. And AC does in fact sometimes offer rock bottom fares. Not to mention that anyone with experience travelling with checked luggage will know that connecting via YUL/YYZ is a lot easier than EWR/ORD.
A while ago, I was looking at YUL-FCO. I always check BOS for flights as BOS is only +2 hour drive for me over YUL. The best price out of BOS was AC BOS-YUL-FCO and it was several hundred dollars less that YUL-FCO. It was also several hundred dollars less than nonstop BOS-FCO.
I am (and have been for a while) of the opinion that any significant growth AC can hope for must come from increased 6th freedom traffic and I suspect any new route takes that into consideration (along with Cargo) a lot more than people here think. We tend to analyse an airline's decision based on our own personal motivations, but doing so is quite short-cited. Plus the airline has a poop ton of data to use when deciding flights.