In December, Porter Airlines launched five new non-stop routes from Ottawa to sun destinations in Mexico, the Bahamas, Costa Rica and the Cayman Islands.
According to senior vice-president and chief commercial officer Edmond Eldebs, the new routes have been embraced by local travellers.
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In December, Porter Airlines launched five new non-stop routes from Ottawa to sun destinations in Mexico, the Bahamas, Costa Rica and the Cayman Islands.
According to senior vice-president and chief commercial officer Edmond Eldebs, the new routes have been embraced by local travellers. Overall, he said the airline is operating at an 85 per cent load factor across its Ottawa offerings.
Eldebs told OBJ recently that it’s all part of the company’s strategy of taking bold risks.
“Many of the routes we’ve added have, historically, not had non-stop services (in Ottawa),” he said. “If you do traditional airline planning, you look at historic data sets to see how much demand there’s been between place A and B. That’s how you plan your network.”
While the airline remains headquartered at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, Ottawa has become a focal point of its operations. With 26 non-stop routes flying from the Ottawa International Airport, the carrier is the largest service provider of any airline operating in the capital.
For a variety of reasons, Eldebs said Ottawa provides opportunity.
“I think, historically, Ottawa has been an underserved market because of the fact that Air Canada, the largest national carrier, has had a huge hub in Montreal, which is about an hour drive away, and another big hub in Toronto,” he said. “It’s more efficient to route passengers through there.”
But Porter, which targets economy fliers and has gained popularity among business travellers, believes Ottawa is worth the investment.
“We’re very optimistic about Ottawa and we’re here for the long term,” Eldebs said. “When you look at the business case, we’ve proven it out, that it’s a success. The fact that the catchment area of Ottawa is a million people and many of those people work across the public sector and, on average, the income is higher — these are people that want to fly. They want to travel and they want to travel from an airport that’s convenient to them.”
Until recently, passengers often flew out of Ottawa in order to take connecting flights to their final destinations, something which Eldebs said left plenty of gaps for Porter to fill with new non-stop routes.
The trick, he said, is figuring out which routes will actually work. Especially since, in Ottawa, the data is minimal.
While there’s plenty of information about how many people travel between Ottawa and Toronto or Montreal, Eldebs said there’s no way of keeping track of where passengers go from there.
“In some cases, there are no demand sets of historic data between two markets, at least not from a non-stop perspective,” he said. “Passengers connect, but when they connect, it doesn’t give us the true representation of the market. So you have to take bigger bets.”
Porter has taken risks both by introducing flights to destinations that are entirely new to the Ottawa market, and by expanding existing routes every few months.
Since 2025, Porter has used Ottawa as a hub to significantly expand its North American network, with flights to from the capital to Ontario cities such as Hamilton, Sudbury and Windsor, as well as other Canadian destinations like Fort McMurray, Alta., Deer Lake, N.L., and Victoria, B.C.
The carrier has also connected Ottawa to more destinations in the U.S., including flights to Miami and Phoenix.
More recently, tensions with the U.S. have accelerated the company’s goal of diversifying its offerings even farther south, which is where its Mexico and Caribbean flights come in.
“We’ve had to be very nimble in reacting to things,” Eldebs said. “For the first time, we expanded outside of Canada and the U.S. We also saw an impact on demand for U.S. (flights) last year. We had a lot of U.S. flights, so we wanted to diversify to offer Canadians more travel options.”
On the ground, Porter made another big bet on Ottawa, investing $125 million to build a 150,000-square-foot maintenance facility that opened in 2024. Almost two years into operations, the facility employs nearly 100 people, from engineers and shop technicians to administrative support staff.
The airline has a partnership with Algonquin College to provide training opportunities to students in its aircraft maintenance technician program. Eldebs said the partnership will help build out the local talent pipeline as the industry deals with a skilled labour shortage.
Today, when it comes to passenger satisfaction, he said Porter has become the one to beat.
“I think Porter has historically differentiated its onboard experience: free beer and wine onboard our aircraft, premium snacks, meals for purchase,” said Eldebs. “Air Canada, two years ago, announced that they’d be offering free beer and wine on board their domestic routes. They did that because of Porter.”
While Eldebs couldn’t share too much about what Porter will be doing next, he said the carrier is confident in its choice of Ottawa and will continue to increase its presence in the city.
“Our intention is to continue to grow,” he said. “Next winter, we’ll be launching new sun markets that will be public soon. So keep an eye out for an announcement coming shortly.”
