Swoop flies back to city after pandemic halt

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This article was published 24/04/2021 (1619 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Even with Canada’s third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic flaring, the country’s airlines are banking on vaccination rates providing a path towards recovery for the industry battered by the pandemic.

Today, low-fare carrier Swoop, a subsidiary of WestJet, returns to servicing Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport after suspending flights to the city last year.

“We’re focusing, to start, on essential travel only. And for that reason, we’re flying just two flights a week to both Hamilton and Abbotsford from Winnipeg, and then laying the groundwork for expanding that service, when it’s safe to do so,” Charles Duncan, president of Swoop told the Free Press.

Duncan said the plan is to add flights between Winnipeg and Kelowna in June, should it be safe to expand service at that time.

“It was really a difficult decision a year ago, to stop flying to Winnipeg,” Duncan said.

“If the (vaccination) rates continue, it will really get us much closer to normal by this summer. So, we kind of have our sights on that.”

Duncan said that the hunger for travel, especially domestic travel, is likely to pick up as more Canadians are vaccinated — the same trends have been witnessed in Europe and the United States. But in order to prepare for that, some return to service must start now.

“We’re certainly not focusing on leisure or trying to undercut or undermine government directives and those kinds of things. We very much want to follow them and be good citizens,” Duncan said.

Karl Moore, an airline industry expert and an associate professor at McGill University’s business school, said the return of low-fare carriers to the Canadian market is not surprising as there is enormous potential for profits in that segment of the industry.

“Now, low-fare carriers may do better. Because when you look at Air Canada, a big part of the profitability comes from business class,” Moore said.

“And that’s great, except for business travel is way down. And working from home, and less business travel will probably be the future… But there’s a huge pent-up demand for you and I going, ‘We want to go somewhere.’ Family travel. And if you’re traveling by yourself or with your family, you’re more apt to go on a budget airline.”

Earlier this month, Air Canada received $5.4 billion in loans from the federal government, along with a $500 million equity investment to help the company recover from financial losses suffered during the pandemic.

Moore said this deal is something that WestJet is definitely watching closely, so it’s also possible there’s a political motivation for WestJet and Swoop to return service to cities where it was disrupted.

They saw with Air Canada what the government wanted: resuming flights, and paying back money to people who had not been refunded, Moore said.

Base fares for one-way Swoop flights to Abbotsford and Hamilton are priced under $100.

sarah.lawrynuik@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @SarahLawrynuik