Photo: Contributed
Kelowna’s airport director says popular direct flights from Kelowna to Los Angeles will likely return.
Sam Samaddar says the route is one of the airport’s priorities and staff have been pitching it to YLW’s partners since United Airlines stopped offering it several years ago.
Direct flights between the two cities were offered from 2012 to 2015. The flights were popular among Kelowna business people, especially within the city’s burgeoning tech sector, which benefited from quick travel times to tech hubs like Silicon Valley.
Since the flights were discontinued, Kelowna’s tech sector in particular have been begging for their return.
That return is something Samaddar would like to see. He says the business case for the flight is strong, with L.A. being the number two trans-border destination from Kelowna.
At the peak in 2013, Samaddar says two separate airlines were flying from Kelowna to L.A. a total of nine times a week, offering a total of 664 seats.
Eventually that slimmed to just United Airlines, which continued to offer a total 477 seats a week direct from Kelowna to L.A.
When United stopped the route Samaddar says the flights were averaging about 87 per cent occupancy each trip.
There were plenty of people who wanted to fly the route, but United was in the middle of pulling out of 15 communities across Canada, due mostly to the economics of physically operating the aircraft they were using.
“It was more of a business decision, not necessarily that the route didn’t work, it just didn’t make sense from a business perspective,” Samaddar said.
YLW has since updated its numbers and Samaddar says the airport believes it can support direct flights from Kelowna to L.A. a minimum of two times a week.
Airport staff are working hard to make a case for the flight, but it’s up to individual airlines to start offering them.
And while Samaddar says he’s pretty sure the flights will come back eventually, he couldn’t give any specific timeline.
Airlines will have to run their own numbers, looking at what the routes might do to traffic on other flights, and how much the initial cost of offering the trips will be.
With such a high initial cost to get the flight going, airlines will want to be sure they can make money on the route.
“You have to remember that the investment by the airline in terms of the asset is very, very high, and so it takes them some time to process the numbers and do their own research,” Samaddar said.
But if and when the flights do return, he said they will likely be an economic boon for the regional economy.
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