Porter Airlines Eliminates Free Snacks & Drinks At Billy Bishop Airport

I make it a rule never to patronize places that have you stuck with no options and that gouge you. I will go hungry before I will buy a $14 sandwich at this airport.

They pulled the free snacks from EWR? Nooooo! That was literally the only thing that made flying out of decrepit Terminal B worthwhile. And Nieuport doesn't own Newark, so what's the excuse?

If you liked Air North’s service, you really ought to fly First Air or Canadian North on the Trans Arctic route. Did it a couple years ago on a gravel kitted 737-200 combi, great fun!

As mentioned but also clarified: The airport has been owned by Nieuport Aviation for over a year now and these changes have been common knowledge among those who fly from the island for a while, especially as constructing has been ongoing in the airport remodel for a while now. Signs about the concession changes have been in the lounges for at least a month and any employee would have been able to tell people about the upcoming changes. Passengers have been asking and lamenting the lack of food choices for a while. While the free coffee was very nice, it also wasn't very good. Other than that almost nothing is changing. the cookies and water are still here, with a happy return to the old delicious cookies. The pop and granola/snack mix are gone, yes, but you can now have real hot food like in most other airports. Is it overpriced? Yes. It's an airport, what do people expect. YULtide, the scotch tasting you had would have been the add campaign for Aberlour scotch and it's happened twice in the last few years. It has nothing to do with Porter or Air Canada and they will probably come back again in a year or two. Unfortunately for YTZ, the airport is very dependent of weather conditions. The runway is just long enough to safely land and any kind of conditions that make a longer runway necessary cause cancellations. The airport is also surrounded by tall buildings making visibility a necessity (it's inside a semi-circle of smoke stacks and skyscrapers). While Porter's pilot problems have exacerbated the cancellations the continued extreme weather has been one of the leading causes for delays and cancellations at YTZ.

The snacks are one thing. The fact that YTZ (90%+ Porter) has the worst on-time performance of any N. American airport, by a huge margin, every single month, is much worse (see https://www.flightstats.com/v2/monthly-performance-reports/airports under N. America, YTZ is under regionals). They use the pretense of weather but this is mid-summer and early fall - the problem is a lack of pilots at their wage level. They also have begun charging for bags, no longer own the airport itself, and are planning to shift their FF program into the rapidly decaying Aeroplan. From the business side, I totally understand their shift to "slightly nicer LCC" and away from premium. But as a flyer, it is quite a bummer.