CANADIAN Airlines has reassured the UK trade that it will continue to be business as usual despite the impending decision by its shareholders on Thursday whether to accept rival Air Canada’s bid for the carrier.
A number of Canadian travel agents this month claimed they were diverting bookings to other airlines because of the uncertainty surrounding Canadian’s future operations.
But Gary Cross, managing director for Europe, Middle East and Africa, said: “Under any Air Canada deal, there would be guarantees, and commercial contracts, passenger liabilities and any other contractual undertakings would be honoured. The proposal does not mean Air Canada will be looking at any material changes to Canadian.”
AMRCorp, which owns American Airlines, has agreed to sell its 33% stake in Canadian to Air Canada.
Under the tie-up, the US carrier has earned around £250m annually in revenue from Canadian’s cross-border feed of passengers. But this arrangement would not survive in a takeover. Both Air Canada and American are part of rival alliances and it is certain that Canadian would have to shed its current healthy partnership with British Airways in the Oneworld group and join the Star Alliance, of which Air Canada is a member.
Canadian and BA currently codeshare on about 1,000 flights a week in and out of Heathrow.
But Cross pointed to Canadian’s current development plans as an indication of its ability to continue as a separate operation rather than be absorbed in a merger.
He said: “There has been no halt to our product initiatives. We recently took delivery of two more Boeing 767-300s for our transatlantic routes and are continuing to revamp our cabins with the new look from our corporate logo. With extra flights we have doubled our business-class capacity.
“We are operating our largest-ever winter operation with 54 weekly flights to Canada, and for next summer we have gained more slots at Heathrow to improve London-Vancouver schedules. We hope this will also allow us to increase service to Calgary to double daily and to continue to build capacity on our Ottawa gateway service.”
He said November is usually a difficult time for every airline operating to Canada, but added that Canadian’s loads on some flights were 300% up – reflecting a trend of increased bookings for the carrier.
“The Air Canada strike in September and October of last year helped us to increase loads at that time, but we have built further business on top of that,” said Cross.
The strong ski market from the UK to western Canada also saw a 17% rise in the airline’s forward bookings for the January-March period this year.