Originally Posted by BFS101
While Air Transat expand from Dublin, there is still a huge demand, both inward and outbound from Northern Ireland to Canada. Zoom, while it came so a sorry end, showed just how much demand (potentially very price sensitive) there was with year round Toronto, Vancouver and a limited Halifax programme.
Yeh thats a fair point, but you also have to acknowledge that while there is a definitely a market there, most Canadians (like Americans) are visiting the whole of Ireland, not just 1 part of it, and Air Transat are obviously focusing their capacity in Dublin and Shannon in that regard. You say yourself the Zoom flights were price sensitive, and we know now that they were low yielding flights for Zoom, and it doesn't matter if they were able to fill the planes, they weren't making money from the flights. Also many of the flights Zoom operated from BFS, only connected through Belfast and actually originated in the UK, so you can't really use load factor as an indicator of the potential market size for a Belfast-Canada connection.
So again, while there is definitely a market there, its not just for Belfast, but for the whole island.