Airlines may be advertising travel but Canadians are largely staying home

This post is a follow up to my post on October 21st, The Slow Recovery of Airline Travel in Canada During COVID-19 - Part 1 and Airlines may be advertising travel but Canadians are largely staying home

Canada’s airlines are desperately trying to get Canada to loosen their international travel restrictions for at least the last 3 months, but they have been hesitant to show how bad it really is out there. After Lucky at OMAAT announced that American TSA had screened over 1 million passengers for the first time since the beginning of March in October, I wanted to see how that compared to Canadian statistics. Now, after Air Canada has started to promote travel again with influencers, I wanted to take another look at the Aviation market in Canada right now. While people are up and arms about Canadian’s and politicians travelling during the peak of the pandemic, it’s good to know that an overwhelming majority of Canadians aren’t travelling (and that’s a good thing!).

The Data

The raw data that Lucky posted is from the TSA website (TSA Screened Passenger Data) and it measures the number of passengers that depart from US airports each day (and therefore go through security). After a quick search, I found that Canada’s version of the TSA, CATSA, posts similar data for the top 15 busiest airports in the country. The airports included in the data include the following airports:

• Calgary International Airport

• Winnipeg International Airport

• Toronto Pearson International Airport

• Ottawa International Airport

• Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau

• Halifax Stanfield International Airport

• Kelowna International Airport

• Québec City Jean Lesage International Airport

• Regina Airport Authority

• Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport

• Saskatoon John G. Diefenbaker International Airport

• Victoria International Airport

• St. John’s International Airport

I’ve taken a screenshot of the most recent data below, but my GoogleSheet with the raw data is here.

Safe to say, this list includes all airports with over 1M enplanements a year and approximately 95% of the Canadian commercial passengers. Some interesting data in this list: 

• The Canadian market is about 1/14th the size of the US Aviation market. There is limited domestic competition in Canada, which drives domestic prices up and limits access to travel 

• Canadian passenger traffic dropped quickly, just like the US, but it hasn’t ramped up nearly as quickly 

• Based on this data, Canada has only passed 20% of the normal passenger volume (80% decline) four times since the end of March, on September 4th, the Friday before Labour Day, August 18th, a Saturday in August, the 18th of December, typically the busiest travel day in the Winter, and January 3rd, 2021.

  • Looking at the baseline data from last year, it looks like they only had 70K passengers screened on that Saturday the previous year, it’s more than likely there is missing data. Does anyone know the answer to why this data is so out of place?

  • For comparison, the USA has 205 days that have had passenger numbers have declined less than 80%, 127 days have declined less than 70%, 29 days have declined less than 60% and 6 days have declined less than 50% (which happened for the first time on December 23rd)

• There were 24 days when less than 5,000 people embarked a plane in Canada 

• April 12th was the low point for Aviation in Canada, with only 3,237 people going through CATSA checkpoints, representing a 98.08% decline compared to the previous year

• Airline screenings didn’t go above 10,000 in Canada for 75 days between March 28th and June 12th

• Passenger data isn’t broken down by domestic, transborder and international, but Toronto Pearson (YYZ) released that data for August (and most recently for November). In November, Domestic travel was down about 80%, International travel was down about 89% and transborder travel was down an incredible 94%. Unlike in the US, Canadians have peaked at about ~20% recovery. Vancouver Airport (YVR) reports similar numbers, although their transborder travel was down 99%.

Overall passenger traffic was down 87.4 per cent in August at Pearson Airport (YYZ) with similar numbers through November.

I created a graph to compare the recovery of travel between the two countries and it’s clear that Canada is recovering more cautiously. The recovery of aviation has stalled as COVID-19 has returned for a second wave, and travel has been out of the mind for many.

I’ve also removed the first 18 days of March to focus on the recovery portion.

Some massive growth in the USA.

Now, the lack of overall direction related to COVID-19 in the United States more than likely contributes to their quick recovery. In comparison, Canada has banned most international visitors and mandated a 14-day quarantine on arrival into Canada that has been in effect for many months now.  In addition, with a negative test required to re-enter Canada, I suspect that the recent Christmas “spike” in Canada will be the last one for a while, as we go into a typically quiet travel period. Overall, in the depts of March, Canada and the United States had a similar level of decline in passengers, but it’s clear that there are more people down South willing to travel in the depths of a pandemic.

The Point

It’s not the time to travel. Full stop. I made that case in early March and I make that case again. When I did end up travelling, I wrote a framework to discuss my comfort to travel and what it would take. One metric was that cases are under 25 per 100,000 inhabitants in your destination and where you’re coming from. Unfortunately, Ontario is at about 150 cases per 100k, Quebec is at 175 cases per 100k and even places like Costa Rica are 4 times the acceptable ratio. Ultimately, Aviation in Canada is going to need a bailout or loan but for now, it’s time to stay home, help the Health Care professionals and get through this together!