It was a good news day for Edmonton and a bad news day for Kelowna.
On Tuesday, Flair Airlines announced that it was moving its headquarters from the Okanagan to Alberta. By the company’s counting, around 50 people will be moving to Edmonton – if they want to remain employed by Flair Airlines, that is.
“We are thrilled today to be declaring that Edmonton is our new hub, our new major transit hub, and, as such, that makes us Edmonton’s hometown airline,” Flair Airlines executive chairman David Tait said during a press conference at Edmonton International Airport.
“We will be, progressively over the coming months, moving our headquarters, where it’s currently situated in Kelowna, so that will bring up another 75 or so jobs with it, and then over the next few years, we anticipate getting up to 300-plus jobs in Edmonton, so I think that’s good news for all of us.”
Once his speech was over, Tait took questions from the press. One reporter asked how many jobs Edmonton will gain to Kelowna’s detriment.
“Well, the numbers coming from Kelowna are not that huge,” said Tait, adding that Flair Airlines already has 76 staff in Alberta’s capital. “It’s maybe about 40 or 50, but we have people in Winnipeg that will be coming here, we have people dotted around in different places that will now be centralizing in Edmonton.”
Prior to fielding questions, Tait said “Simply we are a growing entity. We see ourselves growing significantly in the next few years and beyond. As such, much as we loved Kelowna as a base, it simply doesn’t have the market size and the labour force – nothing derogatory about the labour force in Kelowna – but we just need to scale up right across the board, and as such we need to be in a much bigger metropolitan area, from a market, from every standpoint.
“And we’re not just in the business of flying leisure passengers or back-packers or whatever; we also have small business owners that fly with us as well. Edmonton just was a very easy choice when we looked at all the other alternatives that were out there. We are just thrilled to be here.”
Tait also stated “from a geographic standpoint, from a growth standpoint, there were 101 reasons why Edmonton was very clear to us, that, as Canada’s fastest growing and low-fare airline, Edmonton was the place that we really had to be.”
In conversation with Global Okanagan reporter Klaudia Van Emmerik, Tait said “Kelowna’s been a great base for us,” and “until the last year or so, we were a charter operator, which is a very different operating dynamic to that of a scheduled carrier.
“Over the next three years, we are looking to probably triple the size of the airline, and so Kelowna simply doesn’t have the hub capability as an airport and as a market base that we have in Edmonton, which is a city of 1.2 million or thereabouts, a growing city, a large airport with more gates, etc., etc.
“So it’s really about the size of the market that we want to put ourselves in and our ability to operate a hub so we’ll have flights coming from east and west through here. We’ll still going to fly through Kelowna; Kelowna is very much still a part of our network plans going forward. We will be shortly announcing some winter programs that will encompass the U.S. from there. We intend to grow our flights out of Kelowna, but simply on the basis of the hub that we needed, Kelowna as an airport and the size of the market base and the nature of the market, it really wasn’t quite of a scale that we need to facilitate our growth going forward.”
Tait said “there’s no disrespect to Kelowna in this move; it’s simply about scalability.”
Tait said Flair Airlines will soon be discussing moving options with its Kelowna employees, adding “We only just finalized this deal in the last week, so there’s been lots of rumours flying around about this move. But we weren’t telling anyone that it was a done deal until we had the thing signed off on with Edmonton International Airport.”
“It’s a shame when that happens, but we have to run the business as a business, and this is the right move for the future of the airline and the expansion that we have in mind for the coming years.”
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