The Kelowna International Airport.

Image Credit: Kelowna International Airport

Kelowna airport is at risk of losing its winter flights to the U.S. and sun destinations if the federal government doesn’t quickly reinstate its international status.

As an industry, airports have been lobbying the federal government since the summer of 2020 to put a reopening plan in place but that has yet to happen.

Major airports, such as Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, did stay open to international travellers throughout the pandemic. Kelowna is the tenth busiest airport in the country but some smaller airports, like Quebec City and Billy Bishop in Toronto, have been reopened to international travel ahead of it.

“We’ve been advised by our largest carrier WestJet if we don’t get that international status very, very soon they’re going to have to cancel the flights that we had scheduled in December into the sun destinations and into the U.S.,” airport manager Sam Samaddar told iNFOnews.ca.

“The airlines, even if the government said, in January we’re going to open up your airport to accept international flights, our sun destination flights will be lost because people have made their determination of what they’re doing and an airline is not going to put on a new flight in mid-season.”

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Samaddar is frustrated that he can’t even get details on what criteria or timelines federal agencies require in order to reopen.

He’s dealing with three federal agencies, Canada Border Service Agency, Public Health Agency of Canada and Transport Canada but has only been able to get the reopening criteria from the Quebec City and Billy Bishop airport managers.

“We believe, with everything we have at the airport, we have all the requirements needed to meet whatever demands the agencies will put on us,” Samaddar said. “It’s been very very difficult for us to accept why this is not happening. We continue to push but we are in a window that is quickly closing on us because these airlines have these assets and they have to decide where to put them.”

He said there seems to be politics involved in the process.

“It’s the uneven playing field that’s created when you allow one region of the country to open up and not other regions of that country,” Samaddar said. “When we’re looking to recover our Canadian economy, this is not the way to do it.”

International travel, before COVID, brought in $2.5 million a year in revenue to the airport alone, he said. Then there are the spinoff benefits to the tourism industry, such as hotels and restaurants that have also been devastated by the pandemic.

READ MORE: Kelowna airport 'scrambling' to implement new mandatory vaccination

In the midst of this, Samaddar now has three weeks to figure out how to implement and monitor mandatory vaccination rules for employees and travellers that were announced by the federal government yesterday.

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