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WestJet is a Canadian airline that flies passengers to destinations across Canada, the United States, and overseas.
WestJet is one of Canada's big airlines. It flies people from city to city — mostly within Canada, but also to the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Europe. If you live in Calgary or Vancouver or Winnipeg and you want to get to Toronto for a meeting or to Cancún for a vacation, WestJet is one of the two main choices you have. The other is Air Canada.
The airline business is simple on the surface and brutal underneath. WestJet sells seats. It fills planes with paying passengers and tries to earn more money on each flight than the flight costs to run — fuel, pilots, airport fees, maintenance, the plane itself. That gap is the whole game. When fuel prices jump or a recession hits, the gap can vanish fast. Airlines have famously gone bankrupt doing exactly this. WestJet was founded in 1996 as a scrappy low-cost upstart out of Calgary, a deliberate challenge to Air Canada's near-monopoly. It started with a handful of planes and a friendly, no-frills attitude, grew into the country's second-biggest airline, and built a loyal following — especially in western Canada — along the way. In 2019, Onex Corporation, a Canadian private equity firm, bought WestJet and took it off the Toronto Stock Exchange. Its shares stopped trading on the TSX. That matters because WestJet is no longer a public company — you can't buy its stock anywhere. The airline now operates as a private company owned by Onex, and it still flies under the WestJet name with the same brand and fleet.
The airline business in Canada is small and dominated by a duopoly between WestJet and Air Canada, which makes the market hard to crack for newcomers — every few years a new discount carrier tries and most of them vanish. WestJet itself launched a low-cost arm called Swoop, then folded it back in. Competition from ultra-cheap carriers and from Air Canada's discount brand keeps pressure on ticket prices, and the airline is exposed to the same swings that hit every carrier: fuel costs, the economy, and how full it can keep its planes.
Saved answer · last researched 6 Nov 2026