Air Canada’s vice-president of network planning since 2017, Mark Galardo obviously had a very eventful year in 2020, during which it was necessary to manage a sudden and lasting reduction of nearly 90% in the number of passengers.
Posted on December 21, 2020 at 8:00 a.m.
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My worst moment
At the end of January, all of the company’s senior executives had gathered in Montreal for an annual meeting at the Marriott hotel at the airport. It was there that we saw that the pandemic in China had gotten out of control and that we made the decision to stop all our flights between Canada and China, with effect in the coming hours.
We made this decision without the advice of the government, because we saw that other carriers were starting to do so and that Donald Trump said that the American borders would soon be closed to Chinese visitors.
I have never seen such a thing in my life. I’ve been with Air Canada for 17 years, I had never seen that.
It was morning and there were flights due to leave in the next few hours. We had to decide what we were going to do with all these passengers, with the crews, etc.
I also knew all the investments we had made to create these links with China. It was amazing to stop it so suddenly.
Of course, after that everything fell apart.
My best moment
I can’t put a specific time, other than the birth of my son, just before the pandemic. But the crisis was an opportunity to redo all our planning and that is very, very stimulating for our team.
To put it in context, our network planning team has been very involved, over the past few years, in the process of making Montreal an international hub. We have opened lines to Shanghai, Tokyo or São Paulo. There were a lot of skeptics, and we got them confused.
There it was like an “examination” of our visionary talents. We had to modify our fleet and assess how the industry will change, which market segments will perform better than others, see how we would be able to benefit from them, etc.
We are not doing this blindly, we have several good clues. We can see who is traveling today and why. We can understand who will be traveling for the next two or three years. We created a schedule of three to five years at the end of which we know that we will be back to the form we had in 2019.
We were not starting over, but not far. We know which were our fortresses, which markets worked well and which strategies worked well in the past. We are certain that we will have the same success.
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