Region of Waterloo International Airport - YKF

[danbrotherston]

"If we actually see…"

That's the problem, though, since even before the pandemic we were seeing declining passengers through the airport. And since that's the case WTF are they doing ignoring the targets set out in 2017

What changed is Flair started selling tickets. Just did a search on Kayak for Toronto -> Halifax June 7-14 (YKF is under the YTO Toronto code), and it's $86 return if you fly from YKF, but $407 return to fly from YYZ. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people from Toronto are willing to drive out to YKF for the much cheaper Flair pricing.

Flair says they've already sold lots of tickets out of YKF, it's their best-selling airport, and they want to add more flights. But now YKF doesn't have the passenger capacity for the flights Flair wants to add.

Flair doesn't start flying from YKF til May 1, so right now the passenger volumes aren't there at YKF. But it's pretty easy to look at tickets sold and project that they'll turn into passengers.

I do think Flair might delay flights starting til July 1, when we'll see far more people vaccinated. However, I also think it's silly to not look at sold tickets and make some forecasts about passenger volume. There's definitely risk that Flair goes out of business from AC or WJ competing sufficiently aggressively with them, but it's not like the region decided to expand the airport speculatively.

And so we're betting 44MM of our taxpayer dollars (or, 25MM if you want to be generous) on the success of a small startup airline.

I certainly wouldn't invest my money on that...it's a foolish thing to do.  Airlines usually fail...I have no idea how they are pricing tickets that much cheaper than from Toronto, but I'm going to bet that isn't a sustainable business.