Air Canada to offer direct flights from Montreal to Tokyo
Montreal’s airport authority is eyeing further expansion to the Trudeau airport as Air Canada announced plans to begin direct flights between Montreal and Tokyo’s Narita airport next summer.
The flights, scheduled to begin on June 1, 2018, will be the first direct scheduled service between Montreal and Japan.
The airline said it plans to offer daily non-stop service during the summer, with service reduced to three times a week during the winter.
“This is a day we’ve been looking forward to as we continue to expand Air Canada’s reach internationally from Montreal,” Calin Rovinescu, the company’s president and CEO, said at a press conference announcing the new route on Wednesday morning. “Since 2016, we have added 18 direct links departing from Montreal to five continents.”
The route will be served by a new Boeing 787 Dreamliner — a plane that carries a price tag of almost $200 million, Rovinescu said.
“For us, this is a very important investment,” he said.
The route won’t just be aimed at Montrealers. Rovinescu said the airline will be scheduling connecting flights to Quebec City, Ottawa, Halifax, Charlottetown, Boston, Philadelphia and Orlando to encourage travellers from those cities to fly through Montreal to Japan.
“We certainly could not expect to make a business case for a $200-million investment based only on traffic that emanates from the Montreal community, so therefore we have to, by definition, count on traffic coming from the northeastern United States, coming from Eastern Canada,” Rovinescu said.
It’s part of a larger plan by Air Canada to grow its business through what’s called “sixth freedom flying ” — bringing passengers from the U.S. through a hub in Canada on their way to their final destination in a third country.
It’s a strategy the airline is also pursuing with its other Canadian hubs, Toronto and Vancouver.
“The competition has started to be the competition between hub airports, so if the experience in the Montreal airport is a better one than it is elsewhere, that will give us more of a tool, of an advantage, to be able to attract that type of sixth freedom connecting traffic, primarily from the United States,” he said.
The announcement comes as the number of international flights departing from Montreal is increasing.
In 2004, there were direct flights between Montreal and 30 international destinations, said Philippe Rainville, the president and CEO of Aéroports de Montréal. This year, that has grown to 85.
“The addition of Tokyo on top of Tel Aviv, Algiers and Shanghai certainly reinforces MontrealTrudeau’s status as an international hub,” Rainville said.
Passenger traffic is also increasing.
“We’ve had great success in Montreal,” Rainville said.
Traditionally, the airport authority forecasts passenger growth of gross domestic product growth plus one per cent — that would have given the airport a passenger growth rate of just over two per cent in 2016, he said.
Instead, passenger traffic grew by seven per cent last year and is on track to grow by almost eight per cent this year, Rainville said.
That growth may require further expansions to the Trudeau Airport, where a 65,620-squarefoot expansion to the international wing opened in 2016.
The airport has two runways and could support significantly more flights, Rainville said.
“We’re not at capacity runwaywise, so what we would need to do is add some terminal capacity to be able to accommodate the number of flights,” he said.
“Over the next 12 months, after talking to my partners and obviously the community, we will come up with some more details on our expansion plans.”