Air Canada’s big route push

Air Canada is not adding one flashy route and calling it a strategy. It is redrawing the map around a simple bet: Canadians still want Europe and Asia, and they want more of it nonstop. Since September 2025, the airline has rolled out a string of 2026 announcements that stretch from Mediterranean beach markets to major Asian business hubs, including new Montréal flights to Catania and Palma de Mallorca, the return of Toronto–Shanghai, and a year-round Vancouver–Bangkok service. In January, it added Vancouver–Sapporo for winter 2026. Then it kept going, with Berlin, Nantes, Ponta Delgada, Brussels, and Quito joining the plan. (aircanada.com) The shape of that expansion matters more than the raw number of routes. Air Canada is leaning hard into places that sit between obvious categories. Palma de Mallorca and Catania are leisure destinations, but they also pull diaspora traffic and connecting passengers. Shanghai is a business route, but it also restores a major missing link in Canada’s Asia network. Sapporo is even more specific: a winter route aimed straight at ski and snow travelers, with Air Canada calling it the only nonstop service between North America and Hokkaido. This is not random growth. It is a carrier sorting markets by season, aircraft range, and the kind of traveler most likely to pay for a nonstop flight. (aircanada.com) That helps explain why Montréal shows up again and again. Air Canada has turned the city into a launchpad for thinner transatlantic routes that do not need the scale of Toronto. The summer 2026 plan starts there with Catania and Palma de Mallorca. It expands again with Berlin and Nantes. Air Canada has said those additions are part of a push to build one of the widest-reaching networks from North America, and in November it said the result would be North America’s second-largest transatlantic network by destinations next summer. That is a big claim, but the route list backs up the direction of travel even if the exact ranking depends on how airlines count seasonal destinations. (aircanada.com) The aircraft matter too. Air Canada said the new Montréal–Berlin route will use the Airbus A321XLR, a narrow-body jet built for exactly this kind of mission: long flights to cities that are important, but not huge. That is the quiet engine behind much of this story. The old way to grow long-haul flying was to pack a wide-body and hope demand caught up. The new way is to use smaller long-range aircraft to make more city pairs work nonstop. Air Canada has been explicit that new A321XLR flying also supports year-round service on some Europe routes, including Toronto–Manchester and Toronto–Copenhagen. (aircanada.com) Asia is the other half of the push, and here the airline is using its two biggest hubs differently. Toronto gets Shanghai back, which is the kind of route that signals network heft as much as passenger demand. Vancouver gets Bangkok all year and Sapporo in winter, which tells you Air Canada sees the West Coast as its Pacific gateway for both business and premium leisure traffic. The airline said Sapporo will launch in December 2026 with three weekly flights, and it framed Vancouver as North America’s second-largest Pacific gateway. (aircanada.com) Europe keeps pulling the network outward anyway. In November, Air Canada added Toronto–Ponta Delgada in the Azores and Halifax–Brussels, giving Halifax a second international destination on the airline. Then in January it pushed south, announcing new winter flights to Quito from both Montréal and Toronto starting in December 2026. By Air Canada’s count, the broader summer 2026 build will connect Canada to more than 126 global destinations and up to 155,000 weekly seats across the Atlantic, Pacific, and South America. The concrete detail is almost mundane. Montréal to Berlin is set to begin on July 2, 2026, three times a week, on an A321XLR with lie-flat seats in business class. (aircanada.com)