So you're not a skier? People fly non-stop to plenty of places from Boston that have terrible weather in the winter. There are so many places to travel to in the summer that I rarely hear of New Englander's going to British Columbia. And Banff and surrounding areas are absolutely gorgeous. If Bozeman, Hayden, Jackson, WY etc. work for seasonal winter non-stop flights, I don't see why Vancouver can't be similar. Ever seen how much that JetBlue non-stop to BZN from BOS costs?
Chiming in here as someone who's been to all these places before and skis.
Bozeman, Jackson, Hayden - you're basically flying directly into the community you are recreating in. You may even be able to avoid renting a car, you certainly can avoid any lengthy drives and winter weather/travel issues to get there. All 3 are a substantial hike from the nearest airport hub with noticeably cheaper flights. Hayden less so, but part of the sell there is that you get to avoid I-70 traffic jams, which can be pretty significant variables, particularly if you're starting/ending your vacation on Fri-Sun.
SLC is often fairly overpriced itself in winter with people heading to UT resorts anyway, so you're often not even saving much money there for your 5-7 hours of driving and significant weather risks to get to Bozeman/Jackson. And any other hub is 8-10 hrs of driving without weather issues.
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Vancouver has to compete with Seattle being 2.5hrs away via relatively low weather problem roads (and land border customs often being less annoying to people than by air) and the US generally having significantly lower airfares, which is going to pull some of the demand away there. I have flown into SEA before to ski Whistler.
A quick glance at airfares in the next month is that you're often looking at nearly double the price per person to fly into YVR (Vancouver) vs SEA. Fly out with a family of 4 and you could be talking $1k+ in additional airfare to save yourself 2.5hrs of additional driving each way - at least some of which would often have been eaten up by how much slower the air customs experience often is vs land.
More notes:
- YYC (Calgary) is a much better major hub to pick for Revelstoke/
Banff/Kicking Horse - You don't fly into YVR to ski or travel there to begin with.
- When it comes to the less-visited interior BC resorts - there's some expensive local-ish airports or it's a long drive from either hub. For a few cases like Red Mountain, SEA is actually the shorter drive than YVR.
simpleflying.com
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