HangTen

Airlines do not cancel profitable routes.

There are more than enough unprofitable routes to be dealt with than to start cancelling ones that actually make money.

N1120A

JFK made sense when AC had the double feed of the UA p.s. flights and the connections from various international interlines, whether *A or not. Once they lost the UA feed, I imagine it just wasn't worth it. UA used to route a fair bit of award tickets over JFK to YYZ, which they would have paid AC for, so that alone is a factor.

yul36

I doubt AC delivered many pax to UA transcon. More likely it was to capture int connections, onward to their hub at Toronto. The loss of the Oz connection is gonna be inconvenient for me. No way I will fly AC to ICN with their 2nd rate service in comparison to Asian carriers, so will have to look for other options.

drvannostren

FWIW, I recently flew YUL-LGA and JFK-YYZ (7am flight), both had good loads on a Tuesday. I can't say the exact count or %, but both flights were fairly full, the JFK one surprised me as it was such an early flight, but it's cheap, quick, and gets you to YYZ in time to do some business.

I think AC has positioned themselves well in the NY market. YVR/YYC have the direct to EWR flights, YYZ has all three, YUL has LGA. So I think there's plenty of service and diverse enough but also confined enough as well. I will say though that both LGA/JFK were fairly bad terminal wise, it's been a while since I've been to either and both sucked.

kwflyer

There has been talk of providing direct gate/airside access from the MLL at LGA although they may wait till terminal renovations to do this.

There are varying degrees of profitability.

VX cancelled SFO-YYZ not because it was unprofitable (it was) but they could make more money elsewhere with that plane

Why do airlines X instead Y?

1. Because they can

2. Because they have different priorities than the questioner.

B1

I used WestJet to LGA from T3 at YYZ. At the next gate, there was a TAM 767 that was going to JFK (and then Sao Paulo-t is the largest airline in Brazil). The fare to JFK on TAM was actually lower than any to LGA. I don't know the basis of the arrangement but JFK does have this option in addition to DL and AA.

YOWkid

JJ's focus is on YYZGRU and JFKGRU. So it's not surprising that JJ dumps seats on YYZJFK at a lower price to try to pad the revenue of their fifth freedom service. I'm also sure there is a limit to the capacity they are allowed to sell on YYZJFK.

HangTen

Make no mistake about it. VX's SFO-YYZ service was spectacularly unprofitable.

The rest are semantics.

In 2010, (June - Dec) Virgin America's YYZ-SFO ran at a 60% l/f. YYZ-LAX ran at 65%.

In 2011, (Jan - April) YYZ-SFO ran at a 66.5% l/f. YYZ-LAX ran at 69.4%.

Their break -even at the time was well in the mid 80% range. They lost money hand over fist on those two routes.

AC operated YYZ-SFO at 77.4% between Jan and April 2011. Their system BELF in the first quarter of 2011 was 82.1%.

You can speculate amongst yourselves as to whether or not AC was profitable at their l/f given the amount of discounting that was going on at the time on the route.

I may have the timelines off a bit, but didn't Virgin take the YYZ aircraft and move them into Dallas?

That hasn't exactly turned out ok either. They are being murdered in Love Field.

CloudsBelow

LOL ... kwflyer has zero idea what they're writing about. I mean, just in the last week we've got these gems "airlines absolutely cance profitable flights" and "VX SFO-YYZ was profitable"
kwflyer should have informed VX's SVP of Sales how profitable the route was before she went on the record with this when pulling out of YYZ as fast as possible :

"in the smaller Toronto-West Coast markets we were not able to stimulate demand as quickly as we would have liked. As a young and growing airline we've decided to instead focus on the immediate opportunities that DFW and other markets offer from our California base"

kwflyer

They did, because they felt they could make more money on that route with their limited fleet and it was DFW IIRC. L/f only tell part of the story, yields are what matter.

Fact is airlines with limited fleets will move planes from elsewhere if they believe they can make more money.

But then again, Cloudsbelow also has predicted WG's demise, no doubt from all those 'high premium' YOW cancellations from the Zitka virus. Binary/Excel spreadsheet thinking can only take you so far in life.

kwflyer

Funny that quote said nothing about being unprofitable. Theres a great textbook in the Library Archives in YOW that explains the difference between variance. Some good reading for people who are going to be spending more time in the Nation's capital.

How's AC stock price doing btw?

Shareholder

As noted, this is a tag to the main GRU-JFK-GRU flight and operates 3 or 4 days a week. It's really not meant to feed passengers onto other JFK flights, though the flight times, early evening ex-YYZ and ex-JFK late morning. Any limit to capacity is based on how many empty seats are anticipated to fly between JFK and YYZ in each direction. Otherwise the flight times are not very convenient...though must admit C$149 JFK-YYZ in J isn't a bad deal.

YOWkid

Yes and no.

There is obviously that operational cap. But more importantly, there is likely a hardline selling cap dictated by the Canada-Brazil bilateral air transport agreement. And that's the point I was making.

No doubt and probably good way to get some points in comfort.

MasterGeek

Why did Air Canada stop offering direct flights to JFK from YYZ or YUL ? How am I supposed to conveniently catch my Cathay or JAL First or Business class award flight from JFK ?

eigenvector

Fly on Delta or American?