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The first Lufthansa flight departed YVR on Saturday evening, with three-days-a-week service including Mondays and Thursdays, increasing to five flights per week in September, in addition to six flights a week to Frankfurt that are already on the airline’s schedule.
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“Canada is a key pillar of Lufthansa Group’s transatlantic routes and relationships with North America,” Lufthansa manager Brendan Shashoua said in a statement, noting that the company’s restart of service from Vancouver comes ahead of Washington, D.C., Miami and San Francisco this fall.
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“Travellers are (already) exponentially starting to travel again,” said YVR vice-president Robyn McVickers, explaining the impact of Ottawa’s elimination of quarantine requirements for Canadians and permanent residents returning to the country.
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Last Thursday, the airport’s terminals handled 20,000 passengers in a single day, compared with 3,000 to 4,000 per day prior to the relaxation of quarantine requirements.
“We anticipate that as of Aug. 9, we will see more travellers start to travel again, and we anticipate that level of growth,” McVickers said, promising that the facility “will be ready.”
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Regardless of those details, “(this) is the best news I’ve had in 16 months,” said David Gudgel, CEO of Seattle-based FSR Clipper, the fast passenger catamaran service to Victoria, which shut down due to the pandemic on March 17, 2020, even before the border officially closed.
During its peak summer season, the Clipper employed some 200 people, but cut that back to just 20 during the worst of the pandemic. Gudgel said they hired back another 45 employees to operate a domestic service between Seattle and Friday Harbour on San Juan Island that started May 28.
“But that’s not the mainstay of our business. Victoria certainly is. So this is very meaningful,” Gudgel said.