Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen and members of the committee.
My name is Mark Williams. I'm the president and chief executive officer of Sunwing Airlines. Sunwing Airlines is part of the Sunwing Travel Group, which is a proud family-owned Canadian company and a true Canadian success story.
The Sunwing Travel Group is also a company that has clearly benefited from the opportunities presented by the global markets action plan and the liberalization of air transport agreements. We have grown our business and increased employment opportunities in Canada as a direct result of these programs.
In 10 short years, the Sunwing Travel Group has morphed from a small tour operator with around 70 employees in Toronto and less than $100 million in annual revenues to become the largest vertically integrated travel company in North America, with over 2,000 Canadian employees, over $1.8 billion in revenues, and operations that span coast to coast.
Our Canadian operations include SellOffVacations, an online and retail travel agency chain; tour operations Sunwing Vacations and Signature Vacations; LUXE Destination Weddings, a destination wedding company; and Sunwing Airlines. In addition, Sunwing has over 15,000 employees working at our 21 Blue Diamond Hotel properties, and NexusTours, our destination management company in Mexico and the Caribbean. The senior executives of all of these businesses are based in Toronto. We also own a U.S. tour operator called Vacation Express.
Thanks to the Canada-U.S. open skies agreement, Sunwing Airlines flies U.S. customers to our southern hotels with Canadian-registered aircraft and Canadian crew.
And we continue to grow. Sunwing Airlines is adding five aircraft this year, including three new deliveries from the Boeing factory in Seattle, which will ensure that Sunwing will continue to have the youngest fleet and the lowest CO2 emissions per passenger of any airline in Canada.
In December we opened two new hotels: an 840-room hotel in Cancun called the Royalton Riviera Cancun, and a 320-room hotel in Punta Cana called CHIC Punta Cana. These hotel projects benefit our business in Canada, as we have proven that product-led growth in the Caribbean increases our passenger traffic out of Canada.
There's a good example of this in Jamaica, where Sunwing has been operating hotels since 2011. With the benefit of our own hotel product in Jamaica, Sunwing has grown its passenger traffic out of Canada from 52,000 passengers per year to over 150,000 passengers in just under four years. This summer we're significantly expanding our two Jamaican hotels, which we believe will lead to further expansion of our Canadian business next winter. Without open markets and liberal bilateral air agreements between Canada and the countries we operate to, none of this would be possible.
While Sunwing would not be considered by most to be a business that relies on international trade, our business is essentially all based on international trade. Of the almost three million passengers we carry annually, all but 45,000 are international. Of the five streams identified in the global markets action plan, Sunwing relies heavily on three: access to key global markets; access to capital; and access to talent.
Sunwing benefits from access to markets as afforded by the government's blue sky policy. The opening of bilateral agreements with Mexico and Cuba has provided Sunwing with the biggest benefits to date. Sunwing is now the largest air carrier in the world to Cuba, with over 1.2 million passengers carried in our last fiscal year. The Cuban government recognizes Sunwing's contribution to its economy, and has awarded us the opportunity to manage 11 hotels in Cuba, with over 6,700 rooms. One of those hotels, the Royalton Cayo Santa Maria, was voted the best all-inclusive resort in the world by TripAdvisor this year.
Access to foreign capital allowed Sunwing to complete a large equity transaction in 2010 with TUI Travel PLC, a company based in the U.K., which purchased a 49% economic interest in Sunwing, with 25% voting shares and 24% non-voting shares. We also fund 100% of our Caribbean and Mexican hotel properties through foreign banks, as Canadian banks have been reluctant to fund these projects.
Also, our rapid growth would not have been possible without the access to foreign talent allowed by the temporary foreign worker program. Sunwing does not use foreign pilots in the winter to save money. The TFW program mandates that foreign workers must make at least as much as their Canadian counterparts. In addition, Sunwing pays housing, car, and living allowances to these foreign workers that are roughly equal to the wages we pay to these pilots. That means a foreign pilot costs Sunwing almost twice as much as a Canadian pilot. Sunwing uses temporary foreign worker pilots as a last resort as training bottlenecks limit the number of Canadian pilots it can hire and train for these highly skilled jobs.
Over the last three years, Sunwing has almost doubled its employment of Canadian pilots, from 150 in 2012 to 267 in 2015, and has reduced its reliance on temporary foreign worker pilots, going from 164 in 2012 to 110 in 2015. The ratio of temporary foreign workers to Canadian pilots has dropped from 1.1 to 0.4 over this time period.
Some people have suggested that the use of foreign workers takes away from Canadian employment. In this case, nothing could be further from the truth. Sunwing has used the TFW program to deal with the skill shortage. Every TFW pilot that Sunwing employs creates more than five Canadian jobs as we hire cabin crew, maintenance, airport, and office staff to support our growing fleet. Sunwing is reducing its reliance on foreign workers by hiring and training Canadian workers to replace the foreign workers as it is able to. That is what the program is designed for.
The business of taking Canadians to warm destinations in the south is very seasonal. Looking around Ottawa today, I think you can understand why people might want to hop on one of our non-stop flights to Mexico or Cuba. In July and August, demand drops dramatically. As a business, we need to match capacity to the demand of consumers. In winter, Sunwing brings planes and pilots from Europe to help meet the demand of Canadian consumers. In the summer, Sunwing sends its planes and pilots to Europe to meet the demands of European consumers because they take their vacations in the summer. This arrangement provides consumers on both sides of the Atlantic the opportunity to take a vacation when they want to, at a price they can afford. It also provides companies in Canada and in Europe an opportunity to provide full-time year-round employment to their staff, rather than having to lay off their staff during their respective low seasons.
Government policy should be formulated with the best interests of Canada, Canadian citizens, and Canadian business in mind. From Sunwing's perspective, open trade agreements that allow Canadian companies to compete on a level playing field with businesses around the world are in the best interests of our country. Sunwing encourages the government to continue to pursue its global markets action plan and the liberalization of air transport agreements through the blue sky policy. Sunwing is a great example of how these government policies can provide increased job opportunities for Canadian employees, and lower prices and more choices for Canadian consumers.
Thank you very much.