Little-known carrier WestJet really delivers for Las Vegas

By Richard N. Velotta

Saturday, May 1, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.

Nothing says “international travel” like the sight of a Virgin Atlantic Airways’ Boeing 747 jumbo jet from London floating in over the Strip every day.

The big airliners from Virgin, British Airways, Korean Airlines and Philippine Airlines get most of the attention for international flights to McCarran International Airport.

But the foreign air carrier that delivers the most international passengers to Las Vegas isn’t a household name, nor does it fly jets that attract much attention.

It’s WestJet Airlines, and over the past four years it has quietly been McCarran’s biggest growth story.

Based in Calgary, Alberta, WestJet flies its Boeing 737 twin-engine jets 74 times a week to and from McCarran and 10 Canadian cities.

With more than 150,000 passengers flying WestJet to Las Vegas in the first two months of 2010 — the ninth busiest commercial flier at the airport — the airline is on track to deliver more than 700,000 people this year, easily the biggest deliverer of international visitors to Southern Nevada.

By comparison, rival Air Canada had 73,396 passengers in the first two months of 2010, and Mexico’s dominant carrier, Mexicana, had 32,592. Virgin Atlantic flew 32,922 passengers from London in the same time, and market newcomer British Airways flew 27,729.

“It’s a good story,” Clark County Aviation Director Randall Walker said. “They’ve had phenomenal growth here. They had 200,000 passengers here their first full year of operations, and we’re expecting about 730,000 people this year. Overall, passenger traffic has been down for us this year, but WestJet’s is up around 17 percent. Their loads have been running around 87 percent full out of here.”

The low-cost carrier operates a fleet of 88 aircraft.

WestJet was founded in 1996 by a group of Calgary business leaders headed by Clive Beddoe, a British pilot who decided on a whim to move to Canada and get into real estate but ended up instead teaming with three partners to get into aviation. The airline started by flying three aircraft among five cities.

The company grew domestically and in 2004 began its first trans-border service with flights to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, New York City’s LaGuardia Airport and Fort Lauderdale, Tampa and Orlando, Fla.

That year, the company enjoyed its third stock split and it continued to increase its domestic and international routes. In June 2006, the company launched its WestJet Vacations product packaging airfares with hotel stays in 14 tourist markets.

In 2007 and 2008, WestJet was the fourth most profitable airline in the world, and the nonunion company with 7,600 employees is on a run of 19 consecutive profitable quarters, said Bob Cummings, WestJet’s executive vice president of marketing and sales.

The company has been recognized by Waterstone Human Capital as Canada’s leader in corporate culture for the past five years, and the airline is known for being a fun place to work.

WestJet officials enjoy being a part of April Fools’ Day pranks. A few years ago, the company announced it was offering overhead luggage bins as sleep units, and this year a news release said the company had perfected clapper technology so that passengers could turn lights on and off and change channels on their television systems by clapping their hands.

The announcements got big laughs and lots of publicity, but customers who read through the news releases that were part of the pranks were directed to a website that offered discounted fares on flights purchased that day.

WestJet shares many similarities with two popular discount carriers based in the United States: Southwest and JetBlue.

The company has opted to use one aircraft type — the Boeing 737, like Southwest, and allows passengers to check two suitcases without charge, like Southwest.

And like JetBlue, WestJet offers in-seat live television entertainment systems for passengers.

Most of the airline’s customers, called “WestJetters,” are Canadians seeking to escape their harsh winters. As a result, WestJet offers lots of warm-weather leisure destinations: Mexico, Hawaii, the Caribbean and Cuba.

“It’s tough to make money in Canada because there are so few population centers,” said Mike Boyd, an aviation consultant and analyst with Evergreen, Colo.-based Boyd International.

“It’s gray and cold for much of the year, and the people like to go to places to see if the sun still exists,” Boyd said. “They’re pretty tapped out in Canada, so the trans-border flights — Hawaii, the Caribbean and certainly Las Vegas — make a lot of sense for them.”

A longer version of this story appears in this week’s issue of In Business Las Vegas, a sister publication of the Sun.