Quebec airline targets sun sites.
MONTREAL • Mirabel’s Nolinor Aviation is going south.
The Mirabel, Que.-based charter transportation company said Tuesday it’s starting up an airline, called OWG, that will operate flights to unidentified tropical destinations “in the coming months.” OWG on Monday received federal transport authorizations to provide regular international flight service. Destinations will be announced shortly, Nolinor said.
Nolinor’s announcement comes as the air transport industry faces the deepest crisis in its history as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global demand for air travel is only expected to return to 2019 levels in 2023, International Air Transport Association officials said last week.
“The goal is be ready when air travel restarts for good,” chief executive Marco Prud’homme told the Montreal Gazette in a telephone interview. “Will it be this fall, at Christmas time or sometime in 2021? We’ll see. Obviously right now no one wants to go on vacation and be forced to self-quarantine when they return home, but one day this will change.”
OWG’S creation pits Nolinor against established sun-market powers such as Air Transat, Air Canada and Sunwing Airlines. Air Transat controlled about 43 per cent of the seats on offer to Quebec vacationers for flights to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean last winter, compared with 29 per cent for Air Canada and 28 per cent for Sunwing, according to a National Bank of Canada report published in January.
“This is already a very competitive market, with three dominant players,” National Bank Financial analyst Cameron Doerksen told the Gazette in a telephone interview. “You need well-established air routes, as well as deep relationships with resorts and hotels. It’s very hard to make a go of it in that market without having an association with a tour operator.”
Nolinor isn’t going after vacationers who buy all-inclusive packages, Prud’homme noted. OWG will only sell airplane tickets and let customers book their own accommodation.
“We’re targeting a niche market,” Prud’homme said. “There’s a new generation of customers out there who aren’t looking to spend time in resorts. They want to live like locals and stay in private residences. So I think our service can meet their needs. Having said that, if there are tour operators who are interested in working with us, we will listen.”
Nolinor executives began working on OWG in 2018. The company, which has been operating for 27 years and runs several flights a week to the far north, studied global carriers such as Singapore Airlines and Emirates Airlines to establish in-flight service standards for its new unit, Prud’homme said.
“We’re not in the low-cost business,” he said. “Internally we like to say we’re in the high-love business. We want people to remember our service.”
OWG will operate three recently acquired Boeing 737400 narrow-body jets that are being refurbished at a cost of “several millions of dollars.” It will fly from Montreal’s Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport and Toronto Pearson International Airport, the CEO said.
Asked whether OWG will serve popular Caribbean destinations such as Cuba, Prud’homme said the airline will fly to “places that everyone knows. We won’t try to go to some strange place you’ve never heard of.”
OWG’S name stands for “Off We Go,” the code name that executives gave the project.
“We were looking for a name that could work in either official language, given that we’re going to serve two markets,” Prud’homme said. “OWG kind of looks like a hashtag you’d see on social media. That fits the clientele we want to reach.”
Separately, Prud’homme said Nolinor has no interest in operating new scheduled flights within Quebec to make up for some of the lost capacity caused by Air Canada’s partial withdrawal.
Canada’s biggest carrier said last week it was indefinitely suspending 30 domestic regional routes across the country and closing eight regional-airport stopovers, including four in Quebec.
“We’ve been to this dance a few times before and we’re not going back,” Prud’homme said.
“Yes, people in the regions are protesting. They want regional transport, but what they really want is Air Canada. We’ve spent a lot of time on this file before, and every time Air Canada came back into the market, our phones would stop ringing. So this time, we’re going to let the dance take place without us.”