The International portion of the St. Louis Lambert International Airport's (STL) name has had its ups and downs over the last 3 decades. But even at the airport's low point for international travel (around 2008-2009), Canada and specifically Toronto (YYZ) always maintained status as an important international destination. From 2007-2012, the 3,569 flights from STL to YYZ accounted for over half on all commercial international flights flown out St. Louis. Yes, Cancun had more total seats because larger aircraft were flown on the route, but in terms of flights, Air Canada's (then twice daily) route could not be topped. As St. Louis gets ready to welcome Air Canada service to Montreal (YUL) for the first time, I wanted to look through the some of the stats over the past few decades for routes from STL to Canada.
With service to Montreal, St. Louis will now have two Canadian destinations with non-stops, but it will not be the first time that's been the case for Lambert. From 1999 through 2003, TWA (and post-takeover American) flew to Vancouver (YVR) in addition to Toronto. In fact, for a few years, TWA/American competing on the STL-YYZ route with Air Canada plus aa TWA/American nonstop to YVR (see the notes at the end for some more tidbits on the YVR route).
The available data for STL-YYZ goes back to 1996. And in late 90's, TWA was the main carrier to Canada for STL. In 1998, it flew 87.7k passengers on the route between St. Louis and Toronto, a peak that has not been reached since. While the passenger total was high, load factor that year was an abysmal 47.6%. It really is hard now to imagine a time when an airline would continue to run service where over half of its seats were empty. Of course, the company was only a few years away from being bankrupt/bought at that point. But even when Air Canada started on the route, it was not much better at filling its seats. In 2003, AC had a 39.3% load factor while flying 20k passengers! I don't have any data for the fares (or the costs for that matter) on these routes, so maybe they were able to make some money even at lower numbers.
The chart below shows the total number of passengers on the route since 1996 (a load factor chart is further down). Data for 2023 only goes through the first half of this year.
Looking at the total passengers on the route, there appears to be 5 different eras for flights to YYZ from STL:
The transition from TWA to American is really fascinating and seeing how quickly service levels change between 1999 and 2002 is pretty stark. When American took over, TWA stated that "The agreement will protect air service in St. Louis and maintain St. Louis's role as a major transportation center." But to see the nearly immediate service drops on a route with demand like Toronto, tells a different story. It was nice to at least have Air Canada enter the market and absorb some of the demand and eventually grow the route back to similar levels of passengers.
The STL-YYZ route will be back up to twice daily later this year and it's interesting to see them adding Montreal as seasonal service instead of adding additional frequency to Toronto. In 2019, the third frequency for the STL-YYZ appeared to perform well. While I do not have the O&D numbers between St. Louis and Montreal to know the exact demand, it seems like Air Canada feels that YUL will be able to draw a balance of travelers directly to the city and also passengers using it to connect onward to Europe (or elsewhere). While not quite the size of its YYZ hub, YUL offers lots connection opportunities. Overall, it sounds like a solid strategy to me to add the Montreal route instead of a third Toronto route, since the new route is not likely to hamper the twice daily Toronto route, but could add a few more incremental passengers via O&D growth between STL-YUL. Additionally, the route allows more flexible connection options than just using YYZ.
One point to watch as the route starts up will be the price point for these flights. Anecdotally, the STL-YYZ route always felt a bit high priced compared other flights within North America. Although it was an international route and therefore had some additional costs, I was always a little surprised to see $600 plus round trip tickets even when the planes were not full. I flew the route in May 2013 and it appeared the short flight was filled mostly with business travel or Canadian+Transatlantic travel and less leisure travel to Toronto. I'm not sure if that plan has changed some since the pandemic and there is a little more attention to the leisure travelers. Just taking a quick look at some of the fares for next summer, many STL-YYZ roundtrip on cheaper days are starting around $500 and the STL-YYZ route at around $600 in Standard Economy. That is still a bit higher than traveling nonstop to other East Coast non-Canadian hubs, like New York or Boston, but honestly feels a lot closer in price to me than it used to.
The last thing I looked at for the St. Louis to Toronto route was comparing it to some other similarly distanced routes that Air Canada flies to the US. I looked at the following airports and compared the number of Air Canada departures (counting outbound and inbound) and their load factors in 2014 and 2019:
In 2014, Air Canada seemed to have similar strategies throughout the non-hub Midwest cities with twice daily flights to MKE, CVG, IND and BNA, with MCI only having a single daily roundtrip. STL's load factor in 2014 at 67.7% was actually one of the higher ones of the group. There was not much competition on these routes with Air Canada being the only operator other than WestJet serving BNA and Delta flying to Toronto out of CVG. RDU and BWI had a little more service in terms of departures in 2014, but similar load factors at 65.9% and 71.1%, respectively.
Over the next 5 years (to 2019), Air Canada mostly added service and improved their load factors pretty much across the board. MCI, MKE, and RDU had similar departure numbers, but higher load factors with MCI up at almost 80%. CVG, IND, BNA, and STL all added third daily frequencies and still increased their load factors. BWI did drop a few departures, but still was filling 74% of their seats, an increase from 2014. Air Canada seemed poised to continue to operate a set ofsolid routes to these mostly non-hub cities and possibly continue to expand before the pandemic stalled the service. Luckily, by 2022 all the of the above routes were back in some capacity even if total departures were still below their pre-pandemic peak. Load Factors have been performing well on the lowered service levels, so it seems like it was just a matter of time before more service returned on these routes. That some of that service will add a new pin to STL's route map in 2024 is an extra bonus.
For the few years that TWA and American flew to Vancouver, they had load factors ranging from 57.9% up to 78.1% by the time the route was dropped (although they had slowed service by 2003). Below are the load factors for the 5 years the route was flown.
Side Notes on AC service in 1996 to 1998: I'm really not sure what was going on in these year. It doesn't look like there was much regular service, but in Jan 1996, AC flew 75 round trips STL-YYZ on a CRJ-100 and then didn't fly the rest of the year. Then in Dec 1997 they pick back up service flying 20 round trips that month. Then in 1998, they flew for about once a week on either the CRJ-100 or a DC-9, they had between 1 and 6 departures a month until December when they stopped any "regular" service until July 2021. I'm not sure if these we real service or some type of charter set up or a data issue, but an interesting aside either way.
All the data used in the blog post and charts above was aggregated from the T-100 international segment data available from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.