Icelandic low-cost carrier Wow Air has confirmed its third Dublin-Canada connection
The airline will start flying to Vancouver via Reykjavik in June of next year.
ICELANDIC LOW-COST CARRIER Wow Air will fly from Dublin to Vancouver via Reykjavik starting next year.
The airline will start operating the six times weekly service from 6 June 2019.
The departing flight will leave Dublin at 11.45am and, after a four-hour layover in the Icelandic capital, arrives in Vancouver at 6.15pm following a seven-hour-and-55-minute flight. Fares start from €130 one way.
This will be Wow Air’s third Ireland-Canada connection through Reykjavik. It currently advertises fares from Ireland’s capital to Toronto and Montreal.
It also promotes connections to New York, Boston, Washington DC, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh in the US.
From 18 December, it will roll out services to Orlando, Florida.
The airline is targeting the Irish diaspora, with director of communications, Svanhvít Fridriksdóttir, highlighting that Canada and in particular Vancouver is “hugely popular among Irish emigrants”.
The news comes shortly after it was announced that Wow Air is ditching flights to three US cities: Cincinnati, Cleveland and St Louis.
Competition
Several airlines provide connecting flights to Vancouver. Air Canada’s low-cost subsidiary, Rouge, operates a direct summer service to the city from Dublin.
It is being eyed up Aer Lingus, whose outgoing chief executive Stephen Kavanagh said it is high on the airline’s wish list.
Speaking at the launch of the IAG-owned carrier’s 2019 flights to Minneapolis-Saint Paul and Montreal, Kavanagh described Vancouver as “an obvious candidate” for a future direct flight from Dublin.
Founded in 2011 by CEO Skúli Mogensen, Wow Air currently services 37 destinations in Europe, North America and Asia.
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In an interview with the Financial Times last month, Mogensen said the airline is looking to raise between $200 million and $300 million in an initial public offering within the next year and a half.
In 2018, Wow Air lost $27.5 million with revenues of $486 million. It expects to lose $6 million this year.
The airline has been trying to crack the low-cost transatlantic market that’s also on the radar of Scandi carrier Norwegian Air.
As previously explained by Fora, transatlantic low-cost flight is a difficult nut to crack with several large ‘legacy’ carriers looking to protect their profits.
