Westjet, Group EVP & CCO, John Weatherill at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Americas 2024
Westjet, Group EVP & CCO, John Weatherill 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
John Weatherill:John, what are the biggest trends you're seeing in the aviation industry? Yeah, look, we see the market, the aviation market in Canada is very competitive. We have 4 kind of cross-country airlines operating in this country. For our population size and population density, that's quite a bit. If we compare it to the United States, there's 11 or 12, and they have 10 times the population that we have here in Canada. So it gives an indication it is a very competitive industry here in Canada. It's very challenging, it's a very difficult industry for all players, But we see it as a very competitive marketplace right now. The competitor that exited was quite small, less than 5% of domestic capacity, less than 2% of U.S. capacity from Canada. So we don't see we don't see a major impact on pricing as a result of that. There is some capacity that's come out of the market, but we have much bigger capacity challenges in the market right now with aircraft delivery delays. And I think it's fair to say we are frustrated, and it is a challenge to you know to not get the aircraft that we had expected and planned for when we expected and planned for them. We will get the aircraft eventually, and we are we are looking forward to that. But we do have We have quite a bit of flexibility in our fleet plan. We have the ability to shift different types of aircraft that we get delivered. We have the ability to defer lease returns and retirements if we choose to do that. So we feel like we have a good plan in place to backfill the capacity that we need in the short term. Now, leasing is one of the levers that we can pull in this situation. We're certainly having conversations with all lessors, and that is one of the things that we're looking at. We see a slight step back in terms of the demand versus last summer season. Last summer season was exceptional. I mean, generationally strong. So we didn't expect that that would continue, but I will say transatlantic for us this summer looks very good. It looks like it continues to be very strong from a demand perspective. There is more capacity on the transatlantic from carriers on both sides, but that was expected based on the results that we saw last year, and we're feeling very good about transatlantic demand this year.
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