WestJet announced last week that they would be reducing flights by 15 per cent due to staffing shortages caused by the Omicron variant.
With those reduced flights, the surging cases of the new variant, and over 12,000 flights being cancelled since December 24 in the United States, those looking to get away from the winter weather might be worried they won’t be able to travel.
Justin Revus, the manager of customer experience for the Regina Airport Authority, said they hadn’t seen any major cancellations just yet.
“We’ve seen a few delays due to the weather. When it’s this cold, everybody moving is a little bit slower, the planes are moving a little bit slower, but generally speaking, flights have continued to go out,” he said. “Even since Omicron has gone up, we haven’t really seen much change in passenger traffic.”
Revus said that as for WestJet reducing their flights, he expects it to slightly impact.
“I don’t know how much impact we will see here, there probably will be a couple of flights here or there, but we won’t really know until we get through the end of January and look back on the past a little bit and see what was cancelled.”
He said despite a growing number of COIVD cases; travellers haven’t been too worried just yet.
“What we find with air travellers is they feel pretty safe in the travel journey, from all the increases measures, cleaning, sanitization, masks usage, testing, and proof of vaccination, all those different things,” he said. “It’s just whether the places they were planning to go how they feel about going there, and we are finding a lot of people saying they are waiting to see what happens.”
