Several travel industry experts are casting doubt on a report claiming Canadian air bookings to US destinations are down 70%, while Air Canada says they're only down 10%.
As reported by Open Jaw and many other media outlets, OAG aviation last week said bookings for flights from Canada to the US are down as much as 75% in the coming months.
The sharp drop has since been disputed with one airline executive telling Open Jaw last week “The OAG data are dead wrong, and we have told them so. Those numbers are not approaching reality.”
At its annual shareholder meeting on 31MAR, Air Canada said its decreased cross-border flight bookings for the next six months were “comparable” to an industry-wide drop of about 10%, Canadian Press reports.
How could a once respected aviation industry reporting source such as the OAG get it so wrong?
John Grant, the analyst who prepared the OAG report, said the data had been supplied by a major travel distribution company, but he could not divulge its name because of an agreement with the provider, The New York Times reports.
US-based media relations executive and former aviation reporter Mike Arnot says “Bookings are down yeah — as reported from the OTAs! — but not 70%.”
“Advance bookings data are limited by their source: online travel agencies (Orbitz!) and the GDS partners,” Arnot said on his Linked In page. “It's a sample."
Flight Centre Travel Group in Canada has said Canadian bookings to the US are down around 40%.
Writing at viewfromthewing.com, reporter Gary Leff said the 70% figure “never made sense.”
“I’ve noted in the comments on some blogs it appears to be based on a very limited sample of data that isn’t making apples-to-apples comparisons,” Leff said. “Data from aviation analytics company Cirium shows that bookings are down – a bit – but nothing like the outlier numbers that OAG reports and are dominating headlines.”
Leff, however, said observers still don’t have a full window into bookings through direct channels.
“Headlines about a 70% decline ... are just wrong,” Leff wrote. “That would mean market abandonment at the sort of level we saw in late March 2020 and July 2020 (but) without travel restrictions or a global pandemic” like we had five years ago.
In terms of capacity, the reductions range from 7% by Air Canada to 25% by Flair Airlines, a discount airline, according to Visual Approach Analytics, an aviation research company.”
The Visual Approach refers to states like Florida, in particular, experiencing drastic cuts across the board. Fort Myers and Palm Beach are down 30% and 43%, respectively, compared to April schedules as they existed on January 1, 2025.
But it said there have been no capacity cuts for Hawaii.
Flair Airlines also hasn’t seen as steep of a drop in demand as indicated by the report, Eric Tanner, vice-president of commercial, told the Toronto Star.
Still, Canadian Press quotes Tanner as saying that cross-border trips will comprise just 12% of their network in winter 2025-26, versus 20% over the past few months.
