WestJet promises perks for ‘eastern triangle’ travellers

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This article was published 14/06/2011 (5421 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO — WestJet (TSX:WJA) plans to win business travellers in the lucrative Toronto-Montreal-Ottawa corridor by providing more perks than its competitors, rather than increasing its daily number of flights, the airline’s CEO said Monday.

Airlines are currently fighting a war over business travellers in the so-called “eastern triangle” — worth about $600 million in revenues annually — and each is coming up with its own way of getting business travellers on their planes.

“To be an airline that is going to cater to business travellers requires a strong presence in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal,” WestJet CEO Gregg Saretsky told a business audience at a Toronto Board of Trade luncheon Monday.

Saretsky said the company flies 50,000 passengers out of Toronto each week to all destinations, with Toronto now surpassing Calgary as WestJet’s biggest hub and the company is trying to win a large share of that tri-city $600-million pie.

“There has been a lot of airline deaths in the Toronto-Montreal corridor. We don’t plan to be one of them,” he explained, describing the competitive environment between airlines.

Saretsky says WestJet has no plans to follow in the footsteps of competitors Air Canada (TSX:AC.B) and Porter Airlines, which offer up to 21 flights a day on the busy Toronto to Montreal route. Nor does WestJet plan to expand to Toronto’s downtown island airport like Air Canada did last month.

Instead, WestJet is more concerned with flying planes at rush hours rather than spreading its customers out over multiple planes through the day.

“We’re focusing our capacity at times a day, very specifically, very surgically. We don’t need 21 flights a day as some of our competitors… we need flights at 7, 8 and 9 in the morning and 4, 5, 6, 7 at night,” he said.

Saretsky added that WestJet plans to stick to operating exclusively out of Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.

“We’ll duke it out with Air Canada for what happens at Pearson,” he said, noting that the island airport’s runways are too short for WestJet’s planes.

Saretsky went on to tout his airline’s rewards program and flight time guarantee, which includes 50 per cent off a passenger’s next ticket if their plane is more than 30 minutes late, and other perks like allowing travellers to change certain bookings without a fee and offering them a free alcoholic drink.

— The Canadian Press