Up in Ontario

Canadian Airlines Price Collusion

Just a quick observation: I think the two main airlines in Canada - Air Canada and WestJet - are colluding on price.

This morning I built an itinerary to travel from Vancouver (YVR) to Winnipeg (YWG) in early August for my grandparent's 60th wedding anniversary. Air Canada's Tango brand has been advertising a seat sale so I figured it made sense to shop earlier rather than later.

I fired up my web browser of choice with two tabs and did the exact same search on both AirCanada.com and WestJet.com. Flights came up on both sites with scheduling within minutes of each other. I selected my flights and went to the dreaded tally screen - the screen where they add a third more to the price you thought you were going to pay for the inane miscellany that seems de facto part of air travel.

I flipped back and forth between the sites and compared the prices. They were exactly the same: same price, same schedule of flight. For all I knew they were only flying one plane, co-branded for each of them. I tried a few more searches for different destination, different schedules and they all each matched or were within $20 or each other.

Now that's competition!

WestJet recently settled a lawsuit with Air Canada. In the settlement they admitted to corporate espionage - one of their new employees was a former Air Canada employee and still could log in to the AC extranet to grab their pricing. But they discontinued that, right?

I bring this collusion up because it typifies so many industries in Canada. The side effect of restricting foreign competition in large industries - telephone service, mobile telecommunications, cable service, banks, ISPs, bookstores - is that we have one, two or three choices to choose from, with nothing to differentiate between them. It always devolves to a choice between the least evil of the unsavoury choices. The companies feel they can push people around and bully their suppliers and customers. They suck because they can. No alternatives exist.

Sigh. The outcome? I booked the tickets from WestJet because their planes are newer and have those keen seat-back televisions.