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Friday,  March 29, 2024 2:14 AM 

Air Canada thanks travel trade for a strong 2017


Air Canada thanks travel trade for a strong 2017
Blake Wolfe

Blake Wolfe is an award-winning journalist and editor, who joined PAX after nearly 10 years in Canada’s newspaper industry. In addition to PAX, his work has been featured in publications such as the Metroland Media group of newspapers and the Toronto Sun.

Air Canada thanked the travel trade for another strong year while looking ahead to 2018 last night (Dec. 14), during the airline’s annual holiday party in downtown Toronto.

Representatives from across the industry attended the festivities, closing out a year marked by strong growth and new routes for the airline.

“It’s been an amazing year,” Duncan Bureau, Air Canada’s VP of global sales, told PAX. “We’ve added so many new markets and had tremendous support from the travel trade. This has been an incredible year of growth – our international traffic is up and so is our sixth freedom traffic and we’re excited to report on it at the end of the year.”

Next year will see the launch of flights from Vancouver to Paris and Zurich (as well as the start of year-round flights to Melbourne), along with new non-stop services from Toronto and Montreal to Europe next summer and the addition of the new B737 to the Air Canada fleet, which launched last week on its inaugural flight from Toronto to Calgary.

“There’s going to be more capacity from Air Canada to key markets and the addition of the B737 which is very exciting,” Bureau said. “There’s always lots of excitement bringing on a new plane; every time we bring one on, the company and industry – and customers – get super excited and they start buying toward those aircraft. When we brought in the 787 people started shopping for it on specific markets and I suspect the same will happen with the 737.”

Wrapping up 2017, Bureau also shared a message for the travel trade across Canada.

“Thanks for the continued support – we couldn’t have grown to this level without it," he said. "Since 2009, we’ve grown from $9 billion to more than $16 billion in 2017. It’s an incredible amount of growth and we couldn’t have done it without the travel trade."

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