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As you know, airlines announce new flights all the time. The deepening gloom of late November is a particularly rewarding moment to tell the world about fresh travel opportunities for the coming summer.
However, a flight from a relatively small airport four times a week rarely gets public support from a national leader. Yet this is exactly what happened with the new link cardiff airport.
Destination: torontoAirline: WestJetLeader: Alunred Morgan, First Minister of Wales,
As the route was unveiled, she said: “This is welcome news for travelers, businesses and our tourism industries in both Wales and Canada. With good connections to other Canadian cities, the new Toronto route will open up new economic opportunities for Wales in North America.”
Between May and September next year, the 3,444-mile trip to Canada’s largest city will take just under eight hours, and the return trip will take just over seven hours. Still the aircraft being used boeing 737 max There are only 174 seats on the plane – that’s less than 700 each way, each week.
So why is this such an important moment in aviation for Wales?
Well, from a passenger’s perspective, flying from Cardiff is a pleasure. London Heathrow handles more passengers in a year than Welsh airports in four days. Unlike almost all other airports in the UK, fewer people pass through Cardiff than three decades ago. The number has almost halved since the noughties.
Airport finance is about scale: fixed costs are very high, marginal costs (the extra expense of handling another passenger) are very low. When times are good and passengers are coming, profits increase. But when Tumbleweed expands from duty free to tap + brew craft bars and kitchens, the losses add up quickly.
Each passenger passing through Cardiff Airport is subsidized by the taxpayer by £20. That is why the new transatlantic link is important enough to distract the First Minister from her other duties.
For two sunny years from 2018, Wales was a stopover from the other side of the world. thanks for doing qatar airways linkYou can fly from Cardiff to Auckland, Bali or Colombo with a stop in Doha. But when Covid struck in March 2020, the route was closed. It has not returned.
Airports are about flights, flights, flights – but they’re also about location, location, location. Cardiff Airport is convenient for those lucky enough to live in Penarth or Barry. But its location, next to the southernmost tip of Wales, means that half the catchment area is the Bristol Channel. For people living in East Cardiff, the road journey can take at best an hour.
A national capital needs an international airport with as many connections as possible – beyond the usual Mediterranean connections to Alicante, Málaga and Palma, as well as Amsterdam and Dublin links.
And Cardiff Airport finance director John Leeman is optimistic that the Toronto link will prove to be “a turning point” rather than a throw of the dice. He told me: “As part of the recovery journey, this new route is certainly part of the strategy. For Toronto, our catchment area really takes into account the south-west, the West Country, the south of the Midlands.”
Yes: Due to the absence of direct flights to Canada from Birmingham and Bristol, the obvious route from the Cotswolds to Canada is via Cardiff.
“Our catchment area for this type of route would really define us a little better,” says Mr Lehman. “If we focus solely on shorter distances we can serve a larger population.
“We’re looking at hubs, so we want to go back to the Middle East, we want to go to Frankfurt, we want to go to Paris.”
Final words to aviation analyst Sean Moulton: “Links between the UK and Canada have waned over the past 10 years due to demographic changes, but are seeing a resurgence in 2025 with Air Transat launching Gatwick to Ottawa and WestJet launching routes from both Cardiff and Glasgow to Toronto.
“Although Cardiff is small, there is ‘visiting friends and relatives’ traffic which the route will attract. However, only time will tell whether this link can be sustained in the long term.”