Canada’s Winter Sun Map Grew for 2026-27. Here Is Where the New Nonstops Actually Go

A run of schedule announcements this year quietly redrew where Canadians can fly south without a connection. In April 2026, Air Canada added five new destinations and eleven new nonstop routes to its winter network. Porter and Air Transat followed within weeks with expansions of their own, and in July 2026 WestJet added five more routes. Between them, cities that have spent years feeding sun traffic through Toronto, Calgary or Vancouver now have direct service of their own.

The interesting part is not the destination names. It is which airports got them, and how thin the schedules are. Most of these routes fly once or twice a week, which changes how you should shop them. A weekly flight is not a smaller version of a daily flight. It behaves differently on price, on availability, and on what happens when something goes wrong.

What Air Canada added

Air Canada’s winter 2026-27 announcement, published April 6, 2026, brought four new sun destinations plus Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

The new destinations are Roatán in Honduras (from Montreal and Toronto), Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic (from Montreal), Mérida in Mexico (from Toronto), and Mazatlán in Mexico (from Vancouver). Roatán, Mérida and Mazatlán are listed as subject to government approvals, which is worth remembering before you book non-refundable hotels.

Tenerife is the odd one out and the most interesting. Air Canada is flying it from both Toronto and Montreal on the new Airbus A321XLR, and describes it as the only nonstop service between North America and Tenerife. The Canary Islands exclusivity did not survive the spring, though. In a May 7 release, Air Transat announced weekly flights to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria from Montreal and Toronto, December 12, 2026 to April 4, 2027, so the archipelago now has two Canadian carriers on it, one island apiece. Air Canada’s Toronto service runs twice weekly from October 25, 2026 to late April 2027. Montreal is weekly, starting October 31, 2026. The aircraft carries 182 passengers in a two-cabin layout with lie-flat seats up front, which is unusual on a narrow-body flying that far.

The eleven new nonstops matter more for most travellers, because they are ordinary sun markets from cities that did not have them:

• Vancouver adds Liberia in Costa Rica, Monterrey and Puerto Escondido
• Calgary adds Cancun and Puerto Vallarta
• Edmonton and Winnipeg both add Montego Bay
• Winnipeg also adds Punta Cana
• Montreal adds Aruba
• Quebec City adds Pointe-a-Pitre in Guadeloupe
• Halifax adds Bridgetown in Barbados

Most run between early or mid December 2026 and early or mid April 2027, at anywhere from one to four days a week. Edmonton to Montego Bay is the exception, at daily service.

What WestJet added

WestJet’s winter route release, published July 20, 2026, added five nonstops. All five are once weekly at launch:

• Calgary to Mérida
• Winnipeg to Punta Cana
• Winnipeg to Belize City
• Regina to San José del Cabo
• Ottawa to Liberia, Costa Rica

Calgary to Mérida is the headline. WestJet calls it the airline’s first nonstop into the city and the only nonstop link between Yucatán’s capital and Western Canada. Start dates in the release run from late November to December 20, 2026.

WestJet also says it will serve 50 sun destinations from 15 Canadian cities in peak winter, and that it will remain the leading Canadian carrier to Mexico by number of flights. Those are the airline’s own figures, so treat them as positioning rather than independently confirmed counts. The release adds that capacity increases on existing popular routes will be detailed separately, which means the winter map is not finished yet. On the package side, Sunwing Vacations has a winter schedule running November 1, 2026 to April 30, 2027, with Puerto Plata and Roatán returning and Ottawa to Liberia packaged for the first time.

What Porter and Transat added

Porter’s announcement landed between the other two, and it is the biggest of the winter by route count. Porter’s April 30 release added four new destinations inside a 15 route expansion that the airline says grows its sun capacity by more than 150 per cent, to nearly 5,000 flights. Aruba flies from Toronto and Ottawa, Montego Bay from Toronto, Ottawa and Hamilton, Los Cabos from Toronto, Ottawa and Edmonton, and San José in Costa Rica from Toronto, all on the Embraer E195-E2. The rest of the 15 routes are sun staples such as Halifax to Fort Lauderdale and Cancun, Edmonton to Puerto Vallarta, Phoenix and Las Vegas, and Calgary to Phoenix. Frequencies are healthier than most of what Air Canada and WestJet added, two to five times weekly on the new destinations, and Toronto to Aruba starts earliest of the whole cycle after Tenerife, on October 30, 2026, five times weekly. Montego Bay and San José are subject to regulatory approvals. Porter says it is the only airline flying Ottawa to Aruba, Ottawa to Los Cabos and Hamilton to Montego Bay.

Air Transat rolled its winter out in stages. An April 17 release added Quebec City to San José in Costa Rica, Toronto to Fort-de-France in Martinique, London in Ontario to Puerto Plata and Charlottetown to Punta Cana, all once or twice weekly starting mid December 2026. An April 27 release added Aruba, Barbados and Los Cabos from Montreal, and the May 7 release covered the Las Palmas service plus a new Quebec City to Rio Hato route in Panama. Charlottetown to Punta Cana is the kind of route this cycle keeps producing: a small airport getting its own weekly bank of sun seats instead of feeding a hub.

Once weekly is a different product

A weekly seasonal flight is a single bank of seats. That has four practical consequences, and they are the reason these routes reward early booking more than a daily trunk route does.

First, your travel dates are chosen for you. If the flight goes out Saturday and comes back Saturday, you are taking a seven or fourteen night trip. A nine night trip does not exist on that routing unless you fly home on someone else’s aircraft.

Second, peak weeks sell out properly. Christmas, New Year, and the February and March school breaks all land inside these seasons. On a daily route, holiday demand spreads across seven departures. On a weekly route it lands on one. The mid-January departure can look wide open while the December 26 flight has been gone since September.

Third, there is no cushion if the flight cancels. On a daily route a cancellation usually means a delay of hours. On a weekly route the next flight on that aircraft is seven days out, so the airline has to reroute you through a hub or put you on a competitor. That is worth knowing before you build a trip around a single weekly nonstop with a tight return-to-work date.

Fourth, prices tend to move in one direction. Thin seasonal leisure routes are usually loaded with a modest amount of cheap inventory to seed demand, then step up as the departure fills. The cheap fares are more likely to sit at the front of the selling window than the end. That is close to the opposite of the last-minute logic that works on high-frequency domestic routes.

Where the carriers now overlap

Three overlaps are worth flagging, because competition on a specific city pair does more for fares than any amount of network growth.

Montreal to Aruba is the cleanest head to head. Air Canada listed it in April, weekly from December 6, and Air Transat added the same city pair three weeks later. Two carriers on one new route from launch is exactly the setup that keeps fares honest.

Winnipeg to Punta Cana is the second. Air Canada listed it in April, WestJet in July. Same logic, and Winnipeg travellers should watch it for exactly that reason.

Costa Rica is the third, as a country rather than a city pair. Air Canada is adding Liberia from Vancouver and WestJet from Ottawa, while Porter and Transat are both adding San José, from Toronto and Quebec City respectively. Those are different city pairs, so they do not compete head to head, but Costa Rica is clearly the market everyone decided to grow. Guanacaste Airport, which operates Liberia, said Canadian passenger traffic grew 28 per cent in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025, a figure quoted in WestJet’s release. That is the airport’s own number, and it explains the sudden interest better than any route map does.

If you want to compare the two carriers before picking a side, our WestJet and Air Canada comparison for 2026 covers fare families, bags and change fees. The Flair review is the reference point if a low-cost carrier serves your route as a third option. Flair itself is bringing back Cancun nonstops from Calgary, Edmonton and Montreal in mid December 2026, three to four times weekly, which puts a price floor under those markets too.

Why airlines are adding sun capacity now

The route announcements make more sense next to the travel data.

Statistics Canada reported that in March 2026, Canadian residents returned from 2.6 million trips to the United States, down 6.4 per cent year over year and the fifteenth consecutive month of decline. Trips by air specifically fell 10.8 per cent to 934,100. Over the same month, Canadians made 1.6 million return trips from overseas countries, up 3.5 per cent. StatCan noted that overseas return trips exceeded return trips from the United States by car for the third consecutive month, only the third time that has happened since these records began in 1972, setting aside the pandemic years.

The April 2026 figures pointed the same way. Overseas return trips reached 1.3 million, up 5.3 per cent year over year, while trips from the United States by air were still down 8.1 per cent, as Global News reported from the StatCan data. Total United States trips ticked up slightly, the first increase since December 2024, though StatCan flagged that April 2025 was an unusually weak comparison month.

Read together, that is demand moving away from short American trips and toward longer overseas ones. Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean are the obvious winter beneficiaries, and both airlines are putting aircraft where the demand went. These figures come from the spring 2026 releases and will move, so check StatCan directly if you are relying on the trend rather than the direction.

How to shop these routes

Start with the gateway you can reach without buying a second flight. A new nonstop from a city three provinces away is not a deal for you. Regina to Cabo is more useful to a Saskatchewan traveller than Calgary to Mérida, even though Mérida is the newer market.

Then check the day of week before the price. On a weekly route the departure day decides your whole trip length, and a Thursday pair is a different vacation than a Saturday pair.

Price the nonstop against a connection through a hub. A weekly nonstop is convenient, but it is also the only nonstop, and a route with one operator and one weekly frequency does not face much pressure to be cheap. Two connections a week through Toronto may undercut it. Our flight search will show both, and current deals are worth a look before you settle on a routing.

Finally, treat the routes marked subject to government approvals as provisional, and book flexible hotel rates until the schedule is confirmed and loaded.

Deals we are seeing this week

FAQ

When do these new winter routes start?

Most launch between late October and late December 2026 and run to early or late April 2027. Air Canada’s Tenerife service starts earliest, on October 25, 2026, with Porter’s Toronto to Aruba flights close behind on October 30. Start dates and operating days can change, so confirm on the airline’s site before booking.

Are the new routes daily?

Mostly no. All five WestJet additions are once weekly at launch, and several Air Canada additions run one to four days a week. Air Canada’s Edmonton to Montego Bay is the rare daily one, and Porter’s new sun destinations sit in the middle at two to five times weekly. WestJet says more capacity on popular returning routes is coming.

Does a new nonstop mean cheaper fares?

Not by itself. A nonstop saves time and removes a connection risk, but a single weekly flight with one operator has little competitive pressure on price. Fares tend to fall where two carriers fly the same city pair; Winnipeg to Punta Cana is the one to watch this winter. Compare the nonstop against connecting options before booking.

Schedules, frequencies and fares change. Verify routes and dates with the airline before booking. Figures cited are as of August 2026.