On the heels of Flair Airlines this week launching a new daily-flight route between Vancouver International Airport (YVR) and Cancun until May, the airline has outlined other service increases from Vancouver, as well as a route no other airline has flown in 19 years.
Flair Airlines plans to increase service from YVR to Las Vegas, Puerto Vallarta and San Francisco. It will then launch a new route between YVR and Guadalajara, Mexico, twice weekly starting May 31.
"Flair is going to be the first airline since 2004 to connect Vancouver and Guadalajara," the airline's CEO Stephen Jones said during a virtual press conference this morning.
Flair Airlines also plans to launch a new route between YVR and Phoenix this winter, according to its chief commercial officer Garth Lund.
A planned increase to Flair service out of YVR in summer 2024 includes flying daily to San Francisco, up from four times per week in summer 2023, and three to four times per week until Nov. 19. The airline plans to stop its YVR-San Francisco flights between Nov. 20 and March 8.
Puerto Vallarta flights out of YVR are set to be seven times per week until May 4 and then two-to-three times per week between May 7 and Oct. 24 next year. That compares with two-to seven times per week in the 2022-2023 winter season, and one-to-three times per week in summer 2023.
Flair flights between YVR and Las Vegas are also increasing: to four-to-seven times per week until May 4, which is up from three-to-five times per week in the 2022-2023 winter season. Those flights in summer 2024 are set to be four-to-seven times per week, up from two-to-three times per week this past summer.
Jones touted his airline's passenger growth and said that he believed that the driver is demand for ultra-low-cost fares.
Flair Airlines flew 2.3 million passengers this summer, Jones said. That is up 41 per cent from last summer.
Helping the airline achieve that growth has been that its planes have been about 90-per-cent full on average, Jones said.
Other airlines have also recently enjoyed higher load factors.
Air Canada's managing director for international sales planning Timothy Liu told BIV last week that his airlines' planes tend to be larger and more full than they were in 2019.
"I think you have both," he said. "Obviously, the planes are fuller than before. Depending on the destination, we're putting on some of the larger aircraft. So that could be the result."
