RIP Cattle Car 3000, Gone But Not Forgotten. Review on Canada 3000

Well it's official Canada 3000 as of November 9, 2001 has bitten the big one. The airline filed for bankruptcy protection November 8, 2001 after talks with their various unions on how to save their operations broke down. The promised and hoped for Government bailout never happened. As of today some 5,000 airline employees are without a job. Some 50,000 passengers are stranded at various points about the globe.

To be honest I never liked Canada 3000. I found the service at best adequate, at worst abysmal. However I will mourn their passing if only for selfish reasons. I now have one less option open to me. In some sadistic turn of events while I loathed them, I used them frequently. Often they were either the only airline going where I wanted to go, when I wanted to go, or they were the cheapest.

By strange coincidence I was going to book a flight to Mexico yesterday, November 8th, but never got around to it. Knowing my travel agent he would have tried to get me the cheapest flight available. Today I'd be holding a worthless ticket on a defunct airline. Mind I still have to find another carrier and should be doing that now rather than penning this.

Canada 3000 started as and perhaps should have remained a charter airline. Like their other Canadian based competition they concentrated on a defined but narrow market. In the summer and during holidays they flew Canadians back to the ''old country'' in Europe. During the winter they shuttled frost bitten Canucks south to the sunshine destinations of Florida, Mexico, Cuba and other Caribbean islands.

Limited perhaps but there was enough business for them and their rivals Skyservice, Air Transat, Royal Airlinesetc.. Canada 3000 also ran a limited domestic schedule with weekly or more frequent flights from their hub in Toronto to other points in the country.

I guess it wasn't enough. When Air Canada forced the bankruptcy of their prime rival Canadian Airlines and then bought them out, it created a vacuum. Nature abhors vacuums and so I guess does the airline industry. The executives at Canada 3000 saw their chance and went for it. They set out to challenge Air Canada's monopoly on airline travel in Canada.

They'd already commenced this in one respect. They'd begun expanding their charter routes into until then new and uncharted areas, Fiji , Australia, and India. Next came the buyout and absorption of two smaller rivals CanJet and Royal Airlines.

Royal had already started to expand with a limited domestic flight schedule. They also were incidentally twisting the giant national carrier's tale in doing so. They offered flights to the same destinations within Canada at a fraction of the cost. To add insult to injury they also began to offer Air Canada's Aeroplan reward points on these flight.

There were more than a few hiccups with this rapid expansion. Flight cancellations, integration of not two but three airlines with different unions, operating procedures, even aircraft types. Over the past couple of months though it appeared they were past that, or at least dealing with it. It's been almost two years since Air Canada bought out Canadian and they're still dealing with it over there.

Along the way Canada 3000 ceased being a charter operation and became a full fledged major scheduled airline with regularly scheduled routes both domestic and international. For example they went from having one or at est two flights a week from Toronto to Halifax to five daily. Not only were they a major carrier, they were the second largest airline in Canada and a serious rival to the pampered largest one.

There was no love lost here, and price wars erupted all to the benefit of the consumer. Canada 3000 brought in its own version of upgraded business class. Air Canada countered by setting up last month its own discount airline Tango.

In one sense Canada 3000 had become a major rival to Air Canada those earlier problems with customer service and simple efficiency, they never went away. Instead they magnified so by the end they had become almost as arrogant as their rival. Even as they were going down for the third time they imitated a standard Air Canada ploy. They failed to admit their was a problem. They blamed all their woes on the events of September 11th. At the very end they went and begged for a Government bailout.

They came, they grew too fast, and now they're gone. Hopefully someone else will soon step into the breach. For now though it is the Canadian airline traveller who is the loser once again. Now please excuse me I still have to find someone to sell me a airline ticket, somewhere.