In Vancouver on October 20, Destination Canada announced a three-way partnership with Air Canada and the Lufthansa Group to stimulate leisure and VFR (visiting-friends-and-relatives) traffic from South India. The pilot aligns destination marketing dollars with airline booking and distribution systems—an approach officials say could unlock unmet demand for spring and summer 2027. Under the agreement, Lufthansa’s and Air Canada’s sales teams will jointly target Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kochi, bundling promotional fares with tour content curated by Destination Canada. The campaign was inked on the margins of the Team Canada Trade Mission to India led by Minister of International Trade Maninder Sidhu. Why South India? Despite rapid growth, the region still accounts for just 12 percent of Canada’s annual 300,000-plus Indian arrivals, largely because of complex routings via the Middle East. With Lufthansa’s South-India feed into Frankfurt and Munich and Air Canada’s non-stops from those hubs to Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, the partners believe they can shave several hours off total journey time and capture premium leisure traffic. For Canadian tourism operators, the initiative promises higher-yield visitors outside the peaks of Diwali and summer break. Destination Canada will track conversion rates from search to booking; if successful, the model could expand to other secondary Indian markets or even to Brazil, where similar connectivity gaps exist.
Source: Travel PR News
