Calgary Airport Authority, President & CEO, Chris Dinsdale at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Americas 2024
Calgary Airport Authority, President & CEO, Chris Dinsdale spoke to CAPA TV at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Americas 2024, in Calgary, Canada, about latest industry trends and company developments.
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Transcript
Chris Dinsdale:I think the biggest surprise is probably a very positive one, is that coming to an airport like this, you know, when you're coming from outside and you're bringing new ideas and new concepts, or, you know, you're afraid that there will be pushback and not openness to it, but it's— the entire ecosystem has been completely open, eager to kind of see where they can improve, but also, you know, stay with what they're very good at, which is a lot of things. And so having that kind of openness, it's been very welcoming and very warm, and it's been a really great experience. I think the people have been absolutely fantastic. I think if you look 12 months out, I mean, after all the activity that's been happening, and, you know, unfortunately Lynx, and, you know, which for us as a Calgary-based carrier, it hit us quite hard actually. Our heart and soul was into Lynx Air, quite frankly. But seeing everything that WestJet's doing and all these movements around Porter and Air Transat, I think it's now, the next 12 months is probably a period just to settle down. All these things need time to sort of work out, and so I don't think you'll see much sort of big in that sense. I think it's all these changes are going to settle down. Now, in 12 months' time, yeah, things could still continue. So Calgary is about 70%, roughly, domestic, and somewhere just under 20% is transborder, and the rest is international. Yeah, those— if you look at Tokyo, it was 3-weekly, now it's daily, so I think that's a sign of success. And now with Seoul also starting up, and that's 3-weekly, which is a new route that just, I think, is starting next week, if I'm not mistaken. So I think that bodes well. So both seem to be doing well. What we see is that there's some pretty big untapped markets in Southeast Asia and also South Asia. Some of this is complicated— Russian airspace being closed, I mean, that complicates the story— but I think there are some pretty big untapped markets, and if we look at that, that's probably some of the biggest white spots that we have. I think from our side, you know, we're here to serve our community, we're here to make sure that our ecosystem is successful, I think if there's demand, you know, we don't really have a preference exactly where that's going. It's wherever the community wants and whatever our airlines want. And so no real preference there, to be honest. But yeah, there's some logic to those 2 destinations, those 2 areas. Thank you.
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