Daily seaplane service linking Vancouver, Seattle begins this month

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – You will soon be able to fly from downtown Vancouver to downtown Seattle.

Daily seaplane service linking the two cities starts April 26th, at a cost of $370 one-way.

Harbour Air President Randy Wright says the company’s agreement with Seattle’s Kenmore Air has been in the works for years.

“It’s finally going to happen. We’ve done a lot of research on this. With the tech companies coming up to Vancouver — going back and forth — it makes a lot of sense for them to save time and be up in an hour or back down in an hour.”

Wright is not expecting service to suffer if high-speed rail linking Vancouver with Seattle and Portland actually happens. “The more the merrier! You could come up by train and go back down by seaplane. We do that with a bunch of our partners.”

Amber Sessions with Tourism Vancouver says the United States is the region’s largest overseas market, so this makes sense.
“Last year, we got more than 580,000 visitors from Washington. This is definitely something that we are going to be promoting to a lot of our long haul visitors because we know that they don’t just come to Vancouver. You know, a lot of our visitors from Australia, for example, they might be doing a west coast trip or a BC trip.”

She adds having flights taking off from Coal Harbour makes it easier for people coming here for a convention to quickly get to and from the downtown core.

“The more we can do to expedite ease of access between Seattle and Vancouver, the better it is for both cities — both from a tourism perspective and a business perspective.”

The BC government is spending $300,000 to explore a Cascadia corridor rail line, but a final decision could be years away.

On what’s been called the “nerd bird” route between Coal Harbour and Lake Union, 20 flights are currently offered per week. The Vancouver terminal now has a Canada Border Services Agency customs office, similar to the one in Victoria’s harbour.