AIRPORTS AND THE ECONOMY
Sydney, Halifax airport officials encourage public to fly more often between the two cities
Keeping an eye on passenger numbers.
With airlines moving to larger regional aircrafts such as Bombardier’s Q400, airports in Atlantic Canada are keeping a watchful eye on the number of empty seats on these flights.
Sydney Airport Authority CEO Mike MacKinnon said unfortunately there’s not always enough “bums in those seats” to keep airlines happy.
“The load factors can always improve. The airlines watch these numbers and it drives their decisions,” MacKinnon said during a speech at a Sydney and Area Chamber of Commerce luncheon on Tuesday. “The airline industry trend now is to consolidate operations to operate bigger, not smaller aircraft, and fly fewer frequencies and one of the data points they will always look at is the load factors.”
The luncheon brought executives from airport authorities in Sydney and Halifax to speak on the importance airports play in the local economy and how they can work together.
He said load factors between Sydney and Halifax can improve, and he encouraged the business audience assembled at the Joan Harriss Cruise Pavilion on the Sydney waterfront to use what he says is the convenience of a 50-minute flight to the Halifax region.
Changes in the airline industry on a number of fronts should be reason enough to redefine intraprovincial flights between Sydney and Halifax.
Halifax International Airport Authority CEO Joyce Carter said there must be co-operation since the region is too small for the airports to compete against each other.
“Yes, there are times for sure when we chase the same piece of business, but in a vast majority of cases it’ll be co-operation and collaboration that will drive that growth,” said Carter.
Halifax Stanfield International Airport has started to make changes including reducing the airport improvement fee that’s charged to every ticket from $25 to $15.
Officials with the Halifax International Airport Authority are concerned with a loss of passengers connecting to other flights through the Halifax airport, HIAA chief operating officer and vice-president of business development Bert van der Stege told the audience Tuesday.
“The loss of transfer passengers in Halifax, the loss of people travelling between Halifax and Sydney would bleed into a bigger loss for Nova Scotia we believe,” he said.
“In other words, if we see less people flying from Sydney to Halifax but not connecting to places where we can connect (passengers) and we fly out of Halifax from, we fear that we’re going to lose … the entire route.”
Figures released by the Sydney Airport Authority indicate that 66 per cent of passengers departing from Sydney are first headed to Stanfield International — the largest percentage of passengers from any airport in the Maritimes with a direct flight to Halifax.
Of that statistic, 30 per cent of those passengers continue on beyond Halifax, using connecting flights to destinations across the country, the U.S. and overseas.
“The air service now offered between Halifax and Sydney by our partners — Air Canada and WestJet — is in my opinion, the best in the region,” MacKinnon said.
WestJet operates the 78-seat Q400 aircraft twice a day, while Air Jazz uses the 50-seat De Havilland Dash 8-300 four times a day between Sydney and Halifax.
It means the two airlines offer slightly more than 2,400 seats a week between the airports.
MacKinnon said seat capacity is now at an all-time high and it has pushed average fares to “alltime lows.”
The average all-in cost for a base fair travelling one-way is a little more than $150 to fly to Halifax, he said.
The Sydney airport is currently working on a market leakage survey to figure out why people choose to fly out of airports other than here in Cape Breton.
“It’s data driven. It’s dissected data, sliced many different ways to give us a snapshot of our catchment area,” said MacKinnon. “So if people from Cape Breton aren’t flying from Sydney, we’re trying to understand why.”
The study will be conducted sometime next year by air services consultant InterVISTAS, a company with offices in Ottawa, Vancouver, the Netherlands, the U.S. and the United Kingdom.