Alexis von Hoensbroech spent the first 10 and a half months as WestJet’s CEO laying the groundwork for change — 2023 will be about seeing his plan in action.
The new direction is more of a course correction, an attempt to take the Calgary-based airline back to its roots in a world emerging from two years of pandemic restrictions and lockdowns.
This means more centralization in Western Canada while looking for ways to make flying more affordable and improving the product.
“2023 will be the year where we do a lot of the implementation of the strategy,” he said. “If you look at an airport like Calgary, we will see more than 25 per cent growth from 2022 to ’23. So this is a lot of additional capacity and this will come with quite a few additional routes.”
Von Hoensbroech was named CEO on Dec. 17, 2021, and landed in Calgary to officially take over the position in the middle of February.
He was considered a rising star with the Lufthansa Group, having previously served for three years as CEO of Austrian Airlines, that country’s largest airline pre-pandemic as a low-cost option with a large footprint in central and eastern Europe.
Returning to pre-pandemic levels
Challenges remain as the airline industry continues to recover from restrictions and health orders during two years of COVID-19. WestJet was the only major Canadian airline that did not take pandemic-related federal government assistance, but instead took on hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and debt.
“I think WestJet was doing too many things, was trying to be too many things to too many people, and we have to focus on those areas that made WestJet strong in the first place,” said von Hoensbroech.
For 2022, the airline is running at 78 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, with federal restrictions on flying and cross-border travel still in place until Oct. 1. In December, the airline is running at 90 per cent of pre-pandemic levels — averaging about 600 flights a day with 65,000 guests — and is forecasting a return to 2019 numbers by the second or third quarter of 2023.
This was before extreme weather wreaked havoc on the airline industry during the holiday season. Between Dec. 18 and Dec. 26, 1,450 flights were cancelled by WestJet due to winter storms across the country, affecting thousands of travellers. On Dec. 23 alone, 333 flights were grounded.