Birmingham Airport gets nonstop link to Toronto as Air Transat resumes flights after 9-year hiatus

Air Transat has announced that it will be returning to Birmingham Airport (BHX) with a new route to Toronto Pearson (YYZ), presently unserved. The English airport’s only service to North America today is year-round, nonstop flights to Cancún with TUI, though this primarily caters to a holiday market. Air Transat (along with several other North American airlines) used to fly to Birmingham until October 2017.

Air Transat’s return to Birmingham has been long-awaited. Prior to its exit in 2017, the airline had served the airport for decades, using a mix of Airbus A310 and Airbus A330 equipment. Now, it will use its narrowbody A321LRs which offer fewer seats – and are likely easier to fill.

Air Transat returns to Birmingham

The first service will be on 22 June from Toronto, arriving in and departing from Birmingham the following day. Services will operate twice-weekly on Tuesday and Friday, and will be summer-seasonal. Flights will end on 22 October.

Birmingham Airport says that the service caters to “strong leisure demand” from the broader Midlands and Canada. It estimates approximately 10,000 passengers travelled indirectly between the two cities in 2025. Data from aviation analytics firm Cirium shows that over the 2027 summer season, Air Transat has scheduled 72 flights on the route offering just over 14,300 seats.

“Demand is driven by close family ties, student mobility, working-holiday programmes and corporate transfers between the two countries,” the airport continued. A large Punjabi diaspora residing in Birmingham and Canada’s Ontario province is expected to be partly driving this visiting-friends-and-relatives demand. 67,000 Canadian-born residents can be found in England, the airport says.

Chief Revenue Officer at Air Transat, Sebastian Ponce: “The launch of our new Birmingham–Toronto service reflects Air Transat’s commitment to making Canada more accessible from key regions across the UK.”

In 2023, Air Transat and Porter Airlines announced their intention to move forward with a joint venture agreement. By 2024, the government review of the tie-up had been completed. The deal provides Air Transat with additional feeder traffic for its long-haul flights.

“Travellers across the Midlands will benefit from a convenient non-stop flight to Toronto, together with onward connections to major destinations across Canada through our partnership with Porter Airlines,” Ponce continued.

“Birmingham is a natural addition to our UK network, and we look forward to welcoming our first passengers in June 2027.” 

Aside from Birmingham, the carrier also announced that next summer it would be introducing service from Montréal to Geneva and Faro as well as Quebec to Lyon and Barcelona.

Birmingham Airport previously had a lot of North American connectivity

Alongside Air Transat until 2017, Birmingham Airport also had a fairly consistent level of service to the United States over the years. Some of these airlines included Primera Air, Jet2, United Airlines and American Airlines. Most recently, TUI linked Birmingham with Melbourne, Florida, but suspended this flight in October 2025. Since then, the airport has not had a US connection.

The table below shows a summary of the airport’s North American operations since 2015. Some of these, such as the Jet2 operation (November-December 2017, two flights), either had only a handful of frequencies or operated for a very brief period. This is also the case for Primera Air (May-June 2018).

Source: Cirium

When United Airlines ended daily flights to Birmingham with its Boeing 757 fleet in 2017 after nearly two-decades of flying, it cited the route’s poor financial performance.