WestJet Changed the Brand Promise, They Forgot to tell their Customers

By Shannon Peel | Brand Storyteller | Canadian Brand Sovereignty Series

Once Upon a Time Western Canadians loved WestJet. Loved it. Told the story at dinner about the flight attendant who made the whole plane laugh. Booked again without thinking twice. WestJet was the airline that proved a Canadian company could take on a monopoly, keep prices honest, and do it with a smile that actually meant something.

That airline no longer exists. And it hasn't for awhile.

What flies under the WestJet name today is a private equity asset being groomed for an IPO, with three foreign airlines holding a 25 per cent stake, labour disputes running on rotation, and customer reviews that read like dispatches from a bad relationship.

The question worth asking is not what Onex Corporation did to WestJet after 2019. The deeper question is what WestJet did to itself, long before Onex arrived with the cheque.

WestJet Started With 3 Planes and Brand Promise

WestJet launched on February 29, 1996, with three used Boeing 737s, five western Canadian cities, and 220 employees. The founders, Clive Beddoe, Donald Bell, Mark Hill, and Tim Morgan, had a simple mission. Canadians were paying too much to fly because Air Canada had no real competition. They would fix that.

The model was Southwest Airlines, transplanted to Canada. Low fares, no frills, single aircraft type, fast turnarounds. Simple to run. Cheap to operate.

But they added something Southwest had not originated and no Canadian airline had ever tried. They made the employees owners. Not symbolically. Structurally. Up to 20 per cent of an employee's base pay could go into a company-matched stock purchase plan. Profit sharing cheques were handed out twice a year at catered company parties where families were invited and Beddoe himself stood in the room. Every employee's business card carried the word "owner." The company slogan was "Because Owners Care."

By 2011, WestJet had run 52 consecutive profitable quarters, earned J.D. Power's Customer Service Champion designation, and was named one of Canada's Most Admired Corporate Cultures six consecutive years.

It entered the Hall of Fame. It was a special kind of company. Then everything changed.

Clive Beddoe Was the Culture

What most analyses of WestJet miss is that the ownership culture was a person.

In the early years, Beddoe could be found crouched in the aisles of his own planes, scraping chewing gum off seats. A former staffer described it: "He had a dominating presence that defined WestJet." When Beddoe cleaned up after flights, it was to deliver a single message to everyone watching: Do as I do.

In 2000, WestJet went public and hired its first external CEO, Steve Smith, a former Air Ontario executive. Within 18 months, Smith was gone. Beddoe told the National Post that Smith did not fit in with WestJet's corporate culture and that its energy and drive were threatened. He described Smith's style as "top-down," "militaristic," and "dictatorial." The opposite of what the WestJet brand stood for and employees deserved.

At 1,100 employees, Beddoe could still feel when the culture was being violated. The culture survived.

The ownership culture was real. It was also personal. It required someone at the top who understood it viscerally, modelled it daily, and was willing to act when it was compromised.

The WestJet culture was doomed when the founders exited stage left.

The Founders Left

Between 2004 and 2007, all four founders departed WestJet.

Mark Hill resigned in 2004. Tim Morgan left in 2005. Then, Donald Bell, who held the title Executive Vice-President, Culture, retired in July 2007.

Bell's job title exemplified the brand values of ownership culture. It was a named executive function with a founder answerable for it every day. Bell flew a scheduled round-trip WestJet flight nearly every week, listening to staff, keeping the temperature. When he left, that function quietly disappeared from the organisational chart.

The did not replace the Executive VP of Culture, it was the first shift in the brand's culture.

Before departing, Bell identified the challenge directly: "WestJet's challenge is to maintain its reputation for peppy staff, even as the carrier plans to hire another 1,500 workers over the next three years, adding to the existing roster of 6,000 employees."

The new leadership didn't take up the challenge to protect the ownership culture, the customer experience that made WestJet popular with Western Canadian travellers.

Growth Changed the Game

The original hiring model protected the culture. One accepted hire for every twelve pre-screened applicants. Only 50 per cent of interviewees made it through. At that rate you could screen for the ownership mindset. Not competence. Not availability. The specific disposition of a person who would clean the plane without being asked, crack a joke over the PA and mean it, and treat every passenger as though the quarterly profit sharing cheque depended on how that passenger felt when they walked off the flight. Because it did.

When WestJet needed 400 new flight attendants in six weeks in 2006, that standard collapsed by definition. You cannot run a one-in-twelve acceptance filter at that pace. You fill the seats. You staff the flights. You process the paperwork and call it onboarding.

The employees who arrived after 2007, after 2010, after 2013, walked into a company that told them they were owners. They received a stock purchase plan document and a profit sharing policy. They did not receive Clive Beddoe crouching in the aisle scraping gum off a seat to show them what ownership looked like in practice. They did not receive Donald Bell flying a round-trip WestJet flight every week to take the cultural temperature. They received a PowerPoint deck and a business card with a word on it that was becoming harder to explain.

Some embraced it anyway. Others, treated it like any other job.

The WestJet brand Promise Changed. They forgot to tell the Customers.

The positive customer reviews from the 2014 to 2018 period almost always name a specific individual. A ticket agent in Vancouver who, after a cascade of travel disasters caused by another airline, rebooked a passenger on next-day flights at no charge, refunded money spent on upgraded seats that no longer existed, and when a mudslide closed the only highway to the departure airport days later, arranged a second free rebooking without being asked. The passenger's conclusion: "WestJet staff go out of their way to accommodate client requests. They certainly have no competition from Air Canada." A flight attendant named Mattie, who kept a planeful of passengers calm through a three-hour runway delay caused by air traffic control, working with whatever limited food was available. The reviewer called him exceptional and then wrote: "He should be the benchmark for all WestJet employees."

Read that sentence again. It was written as a compliment. It is also an admission. When a satisfied customer feels compelled to describe one employee as the benchmark for all the others, that employee is the exception. Not the standard.

The negative reviews from the same period describe something different entirely. Customers felt their expectations weren't being met and when expectations aren't met, customers start writing bad reviews. Get enough bad reviews and your brand reputation suffers.

A reviewer from the same period put the brand erosion in a single line: "Not the cheapest budget airline anymore. Sometimes price can be very close to Air Canada. Flight attendants are not good with smile."

The smile that had made WestJet famous was never a training outcome. It was a hiring outcome. It came from people who felt genuinely good about where they worked and what they owned. When employee satisfaction erodes, the smile becomes optional.

One Skytrax reviewer described a transatlantic flight where the breakfast service missed her and her companion entirely. Flight attendants walked past their empty trays without making eye contact. When she flagged someone down, a steward nodded and left without a word. She wrote: "There was no acknowledgement from crew to at least say 'sorry, we completely missed you. I'll get that to you shortly.' This experience has put a damper on my flight and made me rethink about booking with WestJet again, especially since this is our first trip to Europe."

Notice what she was complaining about. Not the missing meal. She focused on the missing acknowledgement. She wasn't describing a service failure. She was describing an expectation failure. When WestJest started they created a certain brand experience and when that experienced missed what people came to expect from WestJet, the brand's reputation started to erode.

The brand experience worked when they were a small regional discount airline. When they started growing and changing their hiring culture, the brand experience changed. They just forgot to tell the customers it wasn't going to be the WestJet they knew. Communicating a brand change to customers is risky, but what is riskier is pretending things are the same and not meeting their expectations.

WestJet Employees Felt the Brand Promise Break

The founders had built a system deliberately designed to make everyone feel equal, no seniority-based scheduling, no hierarchy of tenure, everyone on the same footing regardless of how long they had served. At 220 people across five western cities, that felt like community. At 13,000 people across multiple bases and aircraft types, it felt like punishment.

Bill Trbovich of the International Association of Machinists named it plainly: "You'll have someone who's been working 10 or 12 years and they have to work weekends, and you'll have someone new come in and they only have to work days. It's a hot issue for the senior employees."

WestJet's response was to defend the system as a cultural choice, telling veterans the flat scheduling was something WestJetters themselves had chosen to honour everyone's contributions equally. That response did not hear the complaint. When they chose the flat culture, they were younger, scrappier, felt like owners. Then just like the company grew, so did it's staff and they wanted seniority to mean something. Telling them the system that was grinding them down was actually their own idea was not an answer. It signalled they weren't being heard or respected as longterm employees.

Taking the time to listen. To ask questions. To evaluate systems. Takes effort. The original staff had been treated as owners who had a say in how the culture would work. When they wanted to change it, they were told they no longer had decision making power of an owner.

The Unpaid Flight Attendant

Flight attendants across Canadian airlines are paid only for time in the air, from gate departure to gate arrival, with no compensation for boarding, deplaning, pre-flight preparation, or any ground activity. A CUPE survey of over 9,500 Canadian flight attendants found the average unpaid ground time runs to 35 hours per month. This is an industry-wide practice.

When you feel like an owner of the company you work for, you're willing to put in extra hours for no pay because you are building something together. Once you start feeling like you no longer are part of the ownership culture, you begin to feel like you are like any employee at a company, and you are no longer willing to work for free.

Two Tiered System

Then came Swoop. In 2017, WestJet launched an ultra-low-cost subsidiary specifically structured to fly the same routes, with the same Boeing 737s, for lower wages. The pilots' union said what it was directly: "We could get into a position where we potentially have three airlines under the WestJet group of companies, all flying the same aircraft type for different wages and working conditions. We just see that as an attempt by management to work around the current WestJet pilots' contract."

The employees heard all three messages simultaneously. Your loyalty earns you nothing in scheduling. Your time is not fully worth paying for. And if we can find a way to pay someone else less to do your job, we will build a subsidiary to do exactly that. When employees started feeling powerless and under valued, it started seeping into the customer experience.

A flight attendant representative told CBC News what had happened, speaking anonymously out of concern for her job: "WestJet's culture was based on the concept that we will take care of our people, who will take care of the guests, who will take care of the bottom line. Over the years, we've seen a shift in values."

If we take care of our employee, they will take care of our customers. This was WestJet's internal branding culture and it drove the company's brand promise. If it wasn't working, the brand promise wasn't going to work. WestJet did not just market "care" to passengers; they marketed it to their workforce first. The ownership model worked because it made that sequence feel rational to the people inside it. When they felt taken care of, they took care of the passengers. When they stopped feeling taken care of, the passengers felt it too.

Unionizing WestJet Pilots

In May 2017, WestJet's pilots voted 61.5% in favour of forming a union. Management called it a threat to the WestJet culture. The employees said leadership already abandoned the culture and they needed a contract in its place. Employee trust in leadership was gone and without it, the old WestJet brand promise of taking care of customers because the company takes care of the employees was not possible.

One Trustpilot reviewer from the same period wrote: "Once upon a time WestJet at least pretended to care about the hand that feeds them."

At least pretended to care. The warmth, the humour, the discretionary effort, the ticket agent who holds the connecting flight and the flight attendant who scrubs the tray and says sorry without being asked, none of it was ever a policy. It was a product of people who felt that WestJet was theirs and they were taken care of, that no longer exists and it shows.

The customers felt it. They just couldn't name what they had lost. They only knew that the airline they remembered, the one they had talked about at dinner and recommended to their parents and defended against sceptics, had been replaced by something that wore the same colours and flew the same routes and charged more for it.

It was still called WestJet. That was about all it had in common with what Clive Beddoe built.

WestJet Profits Plummet

Q1 2018 was WestJet's 52nd consecutive profitable quarter. The press release celebrated it. CEO Ed Sims, who had replaced Gregg Saretsky only weeks earlier after his abrupt departure, thanked "every individual WestJetter for rising to the challenge." The language was upbeat.

Then profits slipped 29 per cent in a single year, reflecting difficult weather conditions, the loss of revenue following the end of a codeshare deal with American Airlines, and increased competition.

Q2 2018 was WestJet's first quarterly loss in thirteen years. The airline reported a net loss of $20.8 million, compared with net earnings of $48.6 million in the same quarter a year earlier.

The official explanation from CEO Ed Sims named three culprits. "The impact of the threat of industrial action, in combination with the dramatic increase in fuel price and competitive capacity, provided particularly significant challenges in the second quarter."

That sentence was accurate. It was also incomplete.

Fuel expenses rose 34.4 per cent year over year in Q2 2018. But the fuel spike hurt so badly because WestJet had spent the previous three years adding aircraft types, international routes, and subsidiaries, each burning more fuel per seat than the simple single-fleet 737 operation the airline was built to run. The complexity it had voluntarily taken on to chase Air Canada's market made a commodity price shock disproportionately damaging. A leaner, simpler WestJet would have absorbed it. This one couldn't.

The industrial action threat was real. The newly unionized pilots were eight months into their first contract negotiation, and the relationship had already broken down publicly. The threat wiped tens of millions of dollars from the books. Travellers cancelled bookings and WestJet was forced into heavy discounting to win them back. The airline that had built its reputation on low fares as a deliberate competitive strategy was now cutting prices in panic to recover bookings lost because its own employees were threatening to walk off the job.

One is a brand position. The other is a distress signal.

Can you guess with one describes WestJet's actions?

The competitive capacity problem was real. Flair Airlines was already flying. Air Canada had expanded Rouge. New discount carriers were pressuring fares on the routes that had been WestJet's foundation. WestJet had responded by launching Swoop, but Swoop hadn't yet carried a single passenger. The airline that once owned the Canadian low-cost market was simultaneously trying to defend its discount base, build a premium international product, and fund a new ultra-low-cost subsidiary to recapture the bargain travellers it was losing.

It was fighting three wars with a strategy designed for one.

What no earnings release would say, because no CEO writes this, is that all three problems shared the same root. The industrial action existed because the social contract with employees had broken. The competitive pressure had opened because WestJet had abandoned the operational simplicity that once made it the low-cost leader. The fuel spike was catastrophic because the expansion that was supposed to compete with Air Canada had instead made WestJet structurally indistinguishable from it.

By May 2018, the Canadian business press had noticed. CBC News published a piece with a headline that said precisely what customers were already feeling: "WestJet and Air Canada: How Little Separates the Airlines Anymore."

Independent airline analyst Rick Erickson, who had attended many WestJet shareholder meetings, said plainly: "Like it or not, WestJet is becoming much more like a large international carrier." A Calgary travel agent named exactly what had replaced brand loyalty: "People are very loyal to their frequent flyer program. They might complain here or there about the service, but if they have a frequent flyer program, they are very adamant about sticking with it." That travel agent named the precise moment the brand died.

When people stopped choosing Westjet because of how it make them feel, and started choosing it because of how many points they have accumulated, it was no longer the WestJet brand.

WestJet had spent twenty years being a brand. By 2018 it had become a points system, and Canadians were choosing their points based on whichever rewards program they were deeper into.

Customer reviews from this period read like people who had run out of reasons to stay loyal to WestJet.

One TripAdvisor reviewer captured the price collapse directly: "I no more fly WestJet. It is as expensive as Air Canada. Sometimes, Air Canada is less."

Another reviewer, describing the same trajectory, wrote: "I've been flying WestJet for years, but never again. Air Canada has far better service now."

"Air Canada has far better service now" would have been absurd in 2005. It started appearing in reviews with regularity after 2018. Not because Air Canada had transformed itself, but because WestJet had. When your brand promise was always "we are not Air Canada," becoming indistinguishable from Air Canada is not a strategic repositioning.

The CBC piece was unsparing on what had changed internally: "In the early years, pilots, flight attendants and ground crews knew each other on a first-name basis. Now, the airline has around 13,000 employees. Pilots are threatening to strike, while flight attendants and ground crews were also thinking about unionizing. Employees are still owners, but the close-knit team atmosphere is fading."

Still owners. But the close-knit team atmosphere is fading.

A journalist wrote that in May 2018, twelve months after the pilot union certified and years after Donald Bell retired and took the VP of Culture title with him. It was not news to anyone inside the building. It was simply the first time it had been written plainly in public.

Then came the Boeing 737 MAX 8 problem.

WestJet's 13 Boeing 737 MAX 8s comprised approximately 10 per cent of its seat capacity. The aircraft was supposed to be the cornerstone of WestJet's fleet modernisation, the fuel-efficient workhorse that would restore the cost advantage it had surrendered through expansion. In October 2018, a Lion Air 737 MAX crashed into the Java Sea, killing 189 people. In March 2019, an Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX went down shortly after takeoff, killing 157 more. Regulators grounded the aircraft worldwide. CEO Ed Sims said the grounding was having a "substantial negative impact," forcing WestJet to increase fuel spending and cut routes. The airline suspended its entire 2019 financial forecast.

The aircraft WestJet had ordered to fix its cost structure was parked on a tarmac. The pilots were in arbitration. The culture was a memory held by employees who remembered what it felt like before the company got too big to feel anything. WestJet was now expected to earn $1.24 per share in 2019, compared with $2.92 in 2015. Profitability per share had more than halved in four years.

In May 2019, Onex Corporation arrived with $31 per share in cash. WestJet stock had been trading at $18.52. Shareholders voted 92.5 per cent in favour.

It was not a difficult decision. When a brand has stopped making people feel something worth feeling, the cheque is easy to take.

Onex Bought WestJet's Body

The story is as old as markets. Private equity buys beloved brand, strips it of it's wealth, prepares for exit.

Onex bought a company whose culture was broken. The pilots had already voted for a union. Flight attendants were heading toward certification. The founding executives were gone. Senior staff were grinding out weekend shifts alongside new hires. Swoop was being structured to pay the same people less for the same work.

Under Onex, Unifor documented the shift, the airline transformed from the "employees as owners" model to a trajectory with all decisions "solely based on improved profits and efficiencies." Loyal WestJetters who had helped build the company had their jobs outsourced to the lowest bidder. The word "owner" disappeared from more than the business cards.

Then the pandemic accelerated everything.

By mid-2021, the pre-COVID workforce of 14,000 had been cut to 4,900, with 5,000 permanently laid off. Profit sharing was suspended for three years. When it returned in late 2023, it was announced as a milestone. That is what happens when something has been absent long enough that its return is news. Hey everyone we are returning what we took from you, aren't we great! Don't we deserve a pat on the back?

Today, Onex controls WestJet with Delta Air Lines at 12.7 per cent, Korean Air at 10 per cent, and Air France-KLM at 2.3 per cent. Onex has signalled an IPO within two years. The Competition Bureau found in 2025 that Air Canada and WestJet together account for 80 per cent of Canada's domestic air capacity.

The airline built to keep Air Canada honest is now the other half of the duopoly it was founded to disrupt and it's brand promise is as generic and cookie cutter as every other airline in North America.

WestJet needed a new covenant with its people as it grew. Not a new slogan. A real renegotiation of what ownership meant at 14,000 employees across multiple bases, aircraft types, and subsidiaries. It needed to answer the senior pilot who had given twelve years and still drew weekend shifts. It needed to address the industry-wide practice of unpaid ground hours honestly, rather than waiting for a union to force the conversation. It needed to tell Swoop workers what the two-tier wage structure meant for their future.

None of those conversations happened.

Beddoe built something remarkable, and he said it himself: "I always felt for the working man and have been pleased to be able to find a way to let the people of WestJet participate in the business through profit sharing and a very generous stock purchase plan."

He meant it. The tragedy is that when you build a culture around one person's conviction, and that person leaves without designing a system to carry it forward, the conviction leaves too.

The employees stopped believing. Then they stopped caring. Then the customers started noticing. Then Onex arrived with a cheque and nobody in the room argued hard enough against taking it, because the thing that had made WestJet worth fighting for was already gone.

This story is part of the Canadian Brand Sovereignty Series. [Read the full series →]

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Shannon Peel is a Brand Narrative and Communications Strategist. She builds strategic brand storytelling ecosystems, the systems that help businesses, executives, and thought leaders earn authority, credibility, and citations across the digital landscape. Shannon writes about brand strategy, marketing, the Canadian economy, business resilience, and the evolving gig economy. She is a published author of three books, host of the BrandAPeel Podcast.