As the sky slowly cleared for the local aviation community, with passenger traffic picking up at Montreal-Trudeau airport, the breakthrough of the Omicron variant is now forcing airlines to revise their plans for the winter. . Air Canada and Air Transat have announced flight cancellations for the coming weeks and will reimburse affected travelers.
On Wednesday, Air Canada announced the suspension, from January 24 to April 30, of connections with fifteen sun destinations “where the resurgence of COVID-19 and new public administration regulations have resulted in reduced demand”. According to the carrier’s website, the suspended destinations will be: Antigua, Aruba, Samaná, Curaçao, Exuma, Grenada, Puerto Plata, Santo Domingo, Bermuda, Grand Cayman, Havana, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines , Saint-Martin / Sint Maarten and Saint-Kitts-et-Nevis.
“These changes will only affect 7% of our customers given that we maintain the operation of our flights to 23 sun destinations throughout the winter”, however specified the airline.
Thursday, it was Air Transat’s turn to announce its decision to cancel “nearly 30% of [son] schedule for scheduled departures from January 6 to February 25, 2022 ”. The company explained that the lingering effects of the pandemic and health measures had trickled down to “bookings and cancellation requests”, justifying the cancellation of flights “where profitability was affected by low flight rates. filling ”.
Asked about the possibility that these measures could lead to layoffs, Air Canada specified that the next flight suspensions “do not result in[raient] no staff reduction ”. For its part, Air Transat said it was assessing the Omicron variant situation and its impact “on a daily basis” and that it would take “the appropriate decisions in a timely manner”. It also does not rule out making “other adjustments” to the rest of its winter program if necessary.
If Omicron has recently clouded the prospects for recovery in the airline sector, a wind of optimism has been blowing on him since the summer. In recent months, the craze for travel has resulted in a much more enviable passenger traffic record than at the same time last year. Last November, more than 700,000 passengers boarded or disembarked at Montréal-Trudeau airport, approximately four times more than in November 2020. This number still remains below the pre-pandemic level of November 2019, where nearly 1.4 million travelers had passed through the airport.
“From last summer, with the success of vaccination in rich countries, we started to see a little light at the end of the tunnel. The companies brought out their planes. We called back the pilots, the on-board staff, the maintenance people, ”explains Mehran Ebrahimi, professor at UQAM and director of the International Observatory of Aeronautics and Civil Aviation.
In November, passenger traffic at Montréal-Trudeau Airport was more than 50% of what it was in 2019 – it was the first time it had crossed this milestone since the start of the pandemic. “The airlines were even hoping maybe to return to even higher traffic during the holiday season, except Omicron has arrived,” observes Mr. Ebrahimi.
“The recovery has been so quick this year, and people have filled the planes way beyond what we expected. This meant that the somewhat pessimistic predictions that we wouldn’t see a return to normal until 2024 had been brought closer together. We thought perhaps that it could take place at the end of 2022, but the new variant has completely changed all that, ”notes Mr. Ebrahimi, according to whom the sector is still far from being out of the woods.