Air Transat and VIA Rail Canada announced last week that they have formed an intermodal partnership, enabling Canadians to take advantage of both rail and air services when travelling between their home, the airport and their holiday destination.
As a result, Air Transat and VIA Rail have streamlined their service schedules to encourage the purchasing of tickets combining both modes of transportation. Customers are invited to book both their international flight as well as their train ticket (connecting them to the airport) online, quickly and easily. To facilitate the shopping process, a dedicated page has been created on Air Transat’s website (www.airtransat.ca) under the car rental and train travel booking section.
This agreement is the latest in a series of measures taken by VIA Rail to modernise Canadian passenger rail. In the last two years, VIA Rail has entered into numerous intermodal partnerships.
“This announcement is in line with VIA Rail’s strategy of creating synergy among carriers in order to enhance the client experience and facilitate intermodal travel”, said Marc Laliberté, VIA Rail’s President and CEO. “Today’s announcement is driven by our ongoing effort to improve our services. This strategy demonstrates that by working together, passenger carriers can increase the mobility of all Canadians while increasing the number of passengers for all methods of transport.”
About VIA Rail’s intermodal partnerships
Over the course of the last two years, VIA Rail has implemented a strategy involving the creation of intermodal synergies aimed at improving the interconnectivity with other passenger carriers across the country. To date, this strategy has led to partnerships with major urban transportation companies in Montréal and Toronto (Agence métropolitaine de transport in Montreal and GO Transit in Toronto), and three motor coach transportation companies operating in Western Canada, the City of Toronto, and the Maritimes region. VIA has also signed an agreement with Amtrak, a company that specialises in train services in the US, for travel between Toronto and New York.
(Source: VIA Rail)
