I'm (Really) Just Asking Questions About Porter
The privately-held airline doesn't have to tell us much about its business, but people are skeptical. When I mentioned that to Porter's president last week, he bristled.
Dear readers,
As critical as I can be in this newsletter, I actually receive few hate emails or angry calls from airline executives. I think that’s for two reasons — first, “never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel,” as the saying goes.1 Second, I often write about what lots of people say privately, and while executives may find it annoying when I publish those whispers, they rarely fire off a missive to my face — perhaps because they know I have the goods.
There are exceptions, however. Last week, I moderated a session at the Skift Aviation Forum with Kevin Jackson, president of Porter, during which I asked a few questions that touched on industry dynamics working against Porter and the skepticism that some insiders have about its future. And yes, I was a little harsh, as evidenced by my first remarks. “Sometimes I get a question: ‘why does Flair2 exist?’ Or, ‘is Porter still around?’ Why are these people wrong? And why do you think there’s so much negativity about both of your airlines?”
That was (maybe) a bit much. But I do get questions about how many airlines Canada can support, now that Air Canada and WestJet have solidified a near-duopoly in the domestic market. And what I tried to do in the rest of our session was bring up ideas about Porter’s future with a top executive of the airline, at a well-attended industry conference session. I hoped that Jackson would give us a better understanding of what’s happening at this privately-held and secretive company that is not required to make disclosures about its business. But after our session, Jackson made his displeasure known to me in a brief comment backstage, accusing me of parroting Air Canada’s anti-Porter talking points.3
I understand why he was upset. I wouldn’t want to sit in front of an audience and defend my employer either. But here’s the thing: I was just asking questions in good faith, and yet Jackson had apparently decided I shouldn’t be asking them at all — or that if I were asking them, I was prompted to do so by his competitor.
Jackson has hit me a few times about what he perceives as my closeness to Air Canada, but that’s not what’s happening here. Skepticism about Porter comes from many more places, including from people who note how much the industry has changed since Porter started in 2006, when it disrupted important pieces of the Toronto short-haul market.
Now, there are interesting dynamics that are affecting Porter’s business that I and many others want to know about. With Porter moving beyond its turboprop-only operation at Toronto’s Billy Bishop and into flying jets (it will have fifty E195-E2s by year-end) from several airports in Eastern Canada, what does differentiate it from its competition? Indeed, Porter was a tremendous success in its first decade because it built a near-monopoly operation at a very convenient city airport and offered an industry-leading product. But with its jet operation, Porter doesn’t have such a moat in markets like Toronto Pearson, Ottawa, Halifax, and Montreal Trudeau, and while it is building a terminal at another Montreal airport, which could offer a competitive advantage similar to Billy Bishop, that’s not guaranteed. As Porter’s president, Jackson must spend a lot of time thinking about this critical stage in Porter’s evolution.
There’s also something about Porter’s ownership structure that attracts attention. Competitors know little about how ownership makes decisions so they make assumptions about what’s going on. As a serious journalist, I can do more than assume. I wanted to use my time with Jackson to ask real questions, and not fawn over the airline’s onboard glassware.
Having now spoken three times with Jackson over the past two years, I sense he’s tired of being in this position of being asked to elaborate. And yet: he’s choosing a strange way to deal with it. He’s basically saying you’re just going to have to trust me, while appearing touchy and uncomfortable on stage. Here’s what he said last week in one exasperated moment:
After 20 years we’ve been around, we’ve had many competitors say that our demise is imminent. We’ve had that rumor for years. Yet, as we went into Covid, Porter was a profitable airline. We were nearly debt-free as an airline. We had a very established customer base going into Covid. And that created a platform for us now to launch what you see us doing today, which is a very aggressive growth plan across North America. So if I were competitors of Porter, I would try to do everything I could to assume that this incredible strategy that we have is not going to work.