WestJet

On June 27, 1994, a group of entrepreneurs led by Clive Beddoe sketched out a plan for a new kind of Canadian airline. Two years later, WestJet took flight with 220 employees, three aircraft, and just five destinations. The model was simple: take the low-cost, people-first playbook of Southwest Airlines and adapt it for Canada. From the start, the culture was deliberately different. Employees, called WestJetters, were encouraged to have fun and surprise passengers with genuine service, not scripted smiles. It worked. Today WestJet is Canada's second-largest airline and the eighth largest in North America by flight frequency, carrying over 25 million passengers a year to more than 100 destinations across North America, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, and Central America.

WestJet operates from its main global hub at Calgary International Airport, with Toronto Pearson as a key secondary hub. The airline has two direct subsidiaries: WestJet Encore, which flies De Havilland Canada Dash 8 Q400NextGen aircraft on routes in Western Canada, and WestJet Cargo, which uses three converted Boeing 737-800BCF freighters, all previously passenger planes. The fleet now numbers almost 200 aircraft. WestJet also offers WestJet Vacations for packaged travel, and its WestJet Rewards loyalty program. While not part of major alliances like Star Alliance or Oneworld, WestJet maintains codeshare and interline agreements with several carriers.

In 2019, Canadian private equity firm Onex Corporation acquired WestJet for approximately $5 billion CAD, taking it private and delisting it from the Toronto Stock Exchange. The acquisition gave WestJet financial stability to compete more aggressively against Air Canada. But the airline has also faced turbulence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, WestJet initially issued travel credits instead of refunds for cancelled flights, drawing customer backlash until it reversed course in October 2020. A planned joint venture with Delta Air Lines collapsed in November 2020 after the U.S. imposed conditions WestJet called arbitrary. Critics have noted that rapid expansion and globalization have diluted the airline's original scrappy culture, a shift sometimes called losing the WestJet effect. [edit]