Photo: contributed. A Flair Airlines plane operating on behalf of NewLeaf.
Kelowna’s Flair Airlines has bought the discount flight seller NewLeaf Travel Company.
NewLeaf made a splash when it launched last summer, offering deeply discounted flights across Canada.
Not an actual airline itself, the company sold cheap tickets and chartered Flair’s planes and pilots to transport its customers.
Today, Flair Airlines announced it had bought NewLeaf, a move that takes Flair from a charter company to Canada’s third national airline.
Chris Lapointe, the vice president of commercial operations at Flair Airlines, said most of the bones of NewLeaf are still intact after the sale, and that there will be no disruptions to service as a result.
NewLeaf customers might notice some small changes in the near future, but bookings and information are still available on the NewLeaf website.
He said that some kind of merger had been planned since NewLeaf and Flair first began working together.
“It’s always been the plan to put the two companies together, we just didn’t know exactly what that would look like,” he said, pointing out that the only way the arrangement made sense from a business perspective was to combine the two companies’ resources.
When it first launched, NewLeaf boasted about a dozen different flights leaving from almost as many airports across the country, but over time its route map dwindled to the few core airports its serves today.
Lapointe said NewLeaf leadership first approached Flair about three months ago, suggesting an accelerated timeline for the merger. That eventually lead to Flair’s recent purchase of NewLeaf.
Lapointe said Flair plans to focus on its core routes for the remainder of the summer, but that it absolutely intends to expand moving forward. Right now the company owns five planes, and Lapointe said they’d like to start adding more, “ideally by the end of the year.”
He added that he’s confident Flair can make its expansion more successful than NewLeaf’s was, through the use of better planning and more careful analysis of flight data.
“I honestly believe NewLeaf was overly aggressive on some of that stuff [new flight offerings], and under-resourced with providing themselves the time to do it properly,” he said.
“It was a real tight timeline from the time that they announced the new service until they started operating the new flights.”
Lapointe said that, because Flair is such a relatively small player in the Canadian airline industry, the company plans to be very careful where and how it deploys its resources as it attempts to grow.
He said adding a Kelowna flight back to the schedule is something Flair is strongly considering, but the company will have to do a lot more research first.
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