Your day in the sun: It's never been easier to fly away from Ottawa than it is this winter

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by Daniel Drolet, The Ottawa Citizen

Published: Saturday, October 27, 2007

Don Gerlitz remembers how much of a hassle it was when Ottawa residents usually had to travel to another city to fly south. He remembers trying to make the process easier by booking a room near the former Mirabel airport for the night before an early-morning flight out of Montreal.

"I might as well not have slept at all that night," says Gerlitz, a retired public servant with a serious travel bug. "There were kids running up and down the halls at all hours of the night. It was really horrible."

But Gerlitz, along with thousands of other Ottawans looking to fly somewhere warm, now has plenty of options. This winter, there are more charter flights than ever before that leave directly from Ottawa for points south.

These have joined a lengthening list of regularly scheduled flights from Ottawa to cities across Canada and abroad. Together, they point to the fact that, whether you're a tourist or a business traveller, it's becoming easier to fly somewhere interesting from Ottawa -- without having to change planes in Toronto or Montreal.

The exact number of beach destinations linked to Ottawa by direct flights in the winter varies from year to year. This year, there are 16, according to Michael Crockatt, vice-president of business development and marketing for the Ottawa International Airport Authority.

These include three destinations in Mexico: Cancun, Los Cabos and Puerto Vallarta; five in Cuba: Cayo Coco, Holguin, Varadero, Santa Clara and Santiago de Cuba; three in the Dominican Republic: Santo Domingo, Puerto Plata and Punta Cana; three in Florida: Fort Lauderdale, Orlando and Tampa; as well as Montego Bay in Jamaica. Las Vegas, which doesn't have a beach but certainly qualifies as a holiday destination, is also on the list.

Yada yada yada...

But that's just for charters going south. Lots of regularly scheduled flights have recently been added to the Ottawa airport. Crockatt points out that in the last year, Macdonald-Cartier Airport has added eight destinations to its direct-flights list: Toronto Island (Porter); Tampa (Westjet); Cleveland (Continental); Kitchener-Waterloo (Bearskin) and Las Vegas, Moncton, Fredericton and St. John's (Air Canada).

The connection to Kitchener-Waterloo may not seem like much, but Crockatt says it's important to the high-tech community, as it connects Ottawa to another one of Canada's high-tech centres.
He adds that the three Air Canada flights to and from Atlantic Canada connect to Air Canada flights to points west, which helps make Ottawa a more important destination, if only for connecting flights. Ottawa also became more of a hub when Porter Airlines started flights to and from Halifax this year.