The Airline That Started With Three Planes and a Grudge Against Airfare
It began in 1996 with three secondhand jets and a plan to undercut everyone. Today WestJet carries millions of Canadians a year - and it is still arguing that cheap seats and warm service do not have to be a contradiction.
In the mid-1990s, flying across Canada was something you did when you had to, not when you wanted to. Fares were high, the map was thin, and two legacy carriers set the terms. A handful of Calgary businessmen looked at that arrangement and reached a blunt conclusion: it was overpriced, and someone should do something about it. In 1996, with three used Boeing 737-200s and service to five western cities, they did. That company was WestJet.
Thirty years on, the startup with the borrowed jets is Canada's second-largest airline. It runs a fleet of roughly 180 aircraft, employs about 14,000 people, and flies to more than 100 destinations across Canada, the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and - increasingly - Europe. The grudge against airfare turned into an institution.
01Cheap seats, on purpose
WestJet was modeled on the low-cost carrier template that Southwest Airlines had proven in the United States - fittingly, since co-founder David Neeleman would later take the same ideas to JetBlue and Azul. The logic is unglamorous but durable: fly a small number of aircraft types, keep them in the air as many hours a day as possible, sell directly online, and strip cost out of everything the customer does not actually value. What is left is a fare low enough to change the decision from "should I fly?" to "where should I go?"
The founding group - Clive Beddoe, Tim Morgan, Mark Hill, Don Bell, and Neeleman - built the company around that math. Hill wrote the original business plan. Beddoe became chairman and chief executive. The bet was that Canada, a huge country with a modest population spread thin across it, was underserved by expensive air travel, not oversupplied by it.
The founding pitch was simple: Canadian airfare was too high, and a disciplined low-cost operator could prove it.WestJet, founded 1996 · Calgary
02Guests, not passengers
Price got WestJet in the door. Culture is what people remember. Early on the company made a deliberate choice of vocabulary that it still uses: the people on the plane are "guests," and the people who work there are "WestJetters." For much of its history, many of those WestJetters held a stake in the business through profit-sharing and a share-purchase plan, which gave the friendly-service brand something to stand on beyond a slogan.
That reputation went global in 2013 with the "Christmas Miracle" campaign, in which arriving guests found surprise gifts - the ones they had jokingly asked a video Santa for at the gate - riding out on the baggage carousel. It became one of the most-watched airline marketing videos ever made, and it cemented the idea that WestJet was the Canadian airline that seemed to be enjoying itself.
Underneath the warmth sits a specific kind of expertise. Running a value carrier profitably is an operations discipline: schedules built to keep expensive aircraft flying rather than parked, a single dominant aircraft type that simplifies training and maintenance, and a technology stack that pushes travelers to book, check in, and self-serve without a phone call. WestJet's engineering and data teams lean on cloud platforms, mobile apps, and revenue-management systems to squeeze cost out of the parts of flying customers never see - which is exactly what lets the fare on the parts they do see stay low.
03What you can actually book
For a traveler, WestJet is not one product but a stack of them. There is the core airline - domestic and international flights on the 737, plus long-haul routes on the 787-9 Dreamliner. There is WestJet Encore, the regional subsidiary flying De Havilland Dash 8-400 turboprops into smaller Canadian communities that mainline jets skip. There is WestJet Vacations and, since the Sunwing deal, Sunwing Vacations - package holidays that bundle flights, hotels, and transfers to sun destinations.
Wrapped around all of it is a loyalty and payments layer: WestJet Rewards, which lets members earn and redeem points on flights and packages, and the co-branded WestJet RBC Mastercard cards that accelerate earning on everyday spending. After the 2019 restructuring the airline also simplified its cabins into four clear tiers - UltraBasic, Economy, Extended Comfort, and Premium - so the same fare ladder now applies across the unified 737 fleet.
04The private-equity turn
The defining strategic event of WestJet's modern era arrived in 2019, when private-equity firm Onex Corporation acquired the airline for roughly CA$5 billion and took it private. Away from quarterly public scrutiny, the company drifted for a while toward premium service and international ambition - and then the pandemic rewrote every airline's plan.
Under chief executive Alexis von Hoensbroech, who took over in 2022, WestJet did something unusual for an airline: it pulled back. Rather than chase legacy-carrier prestige, it refocused on affordability and on its western Canadian home base, trimmed routes that did not pay, and doubled down on being the value option. It was an un-expansion, and it ran against the industry's usual instinct to grow into every gap.
Rather than chase legacy-carrier prestige, WestJet refocused on affordability and western Canada - an un-expansion the industry did not expect to work.Strategy under CEO Alexis von Hoensbroech
05Buying the competition
If the strategy was value, the tactic was consolidation. WestJet agreed to acquire Sunwing in 2023, folding a well-known package-holiday operator into its leisure business, and completed the operational integration by May 2025. Along the way it absorbed aircraft and routes from its own ultra-low-cost unit Swoop and from the collapsed startup Lynx Air. The result: a unified narrow-body fleet built around roughly 150 Boeing 737s and a much larger grip on Canadian vacation travel.
The math behind the Sunwing deal was less about planes than about owning the whole trip - the flight, the hotel, the transfer, the points. For a value carrier, capturing the entire vacation is a way to earn more from each traveler without simply raising the base fare.
Service begins to five western Canadian cities.
Lists on the Toronto Stock Exchange to fund growth.
Regional turboprop flying begins with Dash 8-400s.
~CA$5B acquisition reshapes the strategy toward value.
Sunwing integration completes; ~150 737s, four cabins.
06How it makes money
WestJet runs a classic value-carrier model. Unit costs stay low thanks to a simplified fleet, high aircraft utilization, and direct online booking. On top of the base fare sits a layer of ancillary revenue - seat selection, baggage, fare bundles, vacation packages, cargo, and the loyalty and credit-card economics that come with WestJet Rewards. The traveler base skews heavily toward leisure and value: families heading to sun, people visiting friends and relatives, and price-sensitive business flyers. Premium cabins and Dreamliner long-haul routes add higher-yield traffic at the top of the ladder.
The Sunwing acquisition sharpened that logic. By owning a package-holiday brand outright, WestJet can sell a single traveler the flight, the hotel, and the transfer, then reward the whole purchase through the same points program and co-branded card. It is a way to raise revenue per customer without simply raising the sticker price on a seat - and it ties the RBC card, the vacation business, and the airline into one loop that is harder for a pure-flight competitor to match.
07A two-airline country
The obvious point of comparison is Air Canada, the larger legacy carrier and WestJet's chief domestic rival. Where Air Canada anchors the full-service, global-network end of the market, WestJet has spent three decades staking out value and leisure. Around them a rotating cast of smaller challengers - Porter, Flair, and the now-departed Lynx and Swoop - have competed at the edges. After the recent consolidation, Canada's aviation map looks increasingly like a contest between two large groups, with WestJet the one built on the premise that low fares and a warm cabin are not mutually exclusive.
There have been turbulent stretches - a 2025 flight-attendant strike briefly grounded mainline 737 and 787 flying and put a spotlight on labour relations inside a fast-growing carrier. But the core proposition has not moved much since 1996. WestJet still sells the same idea it started with: that flying in Canada should be affordable, and that being cheap does not have to mean being unpleasant.