With a clutch of new long-distance routes and a new interline agreement with Alaska Airlines, Canada’s mushrooming Porter Airlines apparently has its eye on the U.S. West Coast.
It’s adding service from Montreal to Los Angeles and San Francisco starting in June, with four-day-a-week service to Los Angeles. On alternate days, the flight will head to San Francisco instead. Similar service from Toronto began in January, as well as a route to Las Vegas.
Part of its West Coast hopes is pinned on its new partnership with Alaska, which will allow passengers to book through itineraries with seamless connections between the two, and will allow Alaska loyalty plan members to earn miles on some Porter flights.
Porter, which up to a year ago only flew 78-seat turboprops around eastern Canada and cities in the U.S. Northeast, has added a fleet of 29 Embaer E195s with 132 seats each and has been sending them to more and more cities, including service to Canadian cities in the west including Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver, and to several cities in Florida.
The expansion has made it #3 in Canada behind Air Canada and Westjet, and has even more ambitions, backed up by another 46 E195s due to arrive between now and 2026. Porter president Kevin Jackson predicts that “Porter will certainly be positioning itself as the No. 2 carrier in the Canada domestic market in the next five years.”
