Low-cost airline with cheap flights to Europe ceases operations in Ontario

A low-cost carrier that only recently launched in Canada with cheap flights to a slew of popular European destinations is now shuttering operations across the country, including out of Ontario’s John C. Munro Hamilton International Airport.

PLAY Airlines first made its foray into Canada in early 2023, advertising inexpensive trips to dozens of major cities that summer, including Amsterdam, London, Paris, Berlin, Dublin and Stockholm.

It held regular sales with fares as low as around $100, with extended stopovers in Iceland, the company’s home country, available at no additional cost to flyers.

Unfortunately, it looks like even PLAY’s regular promotions and steep bargains were not enough to keep the brand afloat here — its final flights out of Hamilton will apparently be on April 22, 2025, airport officials confirmed to the Star this week.

The carrier was operating four flights per week out of the GTA hub an hour from downtown Toronto, and just added a new route to Faro, Portugal over the summer.

Though it has yet to issue a statement about the move, an October release about the future of the company stated that it was “making a fundamental change to its business model by further increasing the emphasis on the strong leisure markets out of Iceland, and, at the same time, de-emphasizing its business of connecting passengers between North America and Europe.”

“The point-to-point part of PLAY’s schedule has been popular and profitable… [but] the yields on its hub-and-spoke part of the business across the Atlantic has been disappointing, particularly in 2024. In response, PLAY has decided to significantly cut back its capacity on its North Atlantic routes. This adjustment is already underway and will continue into 2025,” it continued.

While the company said at the time that the changes would “have no or minimal effects on passengers that have already booked flights with PLAY,” it seems that some customers have already booked flights later than April 22, and are awaiting news on next steps, along with scrambling to book with alternative airlines.