The GCBI Travel Industry Report covers eight brands across airlines, passenger rail, and luxury hotels: Air Canada, WestJet, Porter Airlines, Flair Airlines, Air Transat, VIA Rail, Fairmont Hotels and Resorts, and Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. Data reflects national consumer perception surveys conducted in both 2025 and 2026.

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This report is based on proprietary data from the Great Canadian Brand Index (GCBI).

The 2026 GCBI is based on a national survey of 3,441 Canadian adults (18+) across Canada's ten provinces (territories excluded). The sample was designed to be nationally representative of the adult population, using 2021 Census benchmarks with quotas and weighting applied across age, gender, race, and political affiliation. Respondents rated Canadian brands they were familiar with across seven core value dimensions—Friendliness, Niceness, Respectfulness, Honesty, Tolerance, Adventurousness, and Sustainability—using standardized measures transformed to a common 0–100 scale.

Brand-level estimates were generated using Bayesian shrinkage estimation to improve stability, particularly for brands with smaller respondent samples, and each brand's overall GCBI score is a composite index averaging performance across the seven dimensions. The result is an independent, nationally benchmarked measure of how Canadians perceive leading Canadian brands on the values that shape trust, reputation, and institutional standing.

Data access is available on a subscription basis. If you are interested in custom brand-level reports, please contact us for all enterprise queries.

• VIA Rail—a passenger train service—outscores every airline in the travel category for the second consecutive year, leading on four of seven GCBI dimensions.

• Hotel brands (average 65.22) outperform airline brands (average 62.38) by more than 2 full points. Without airlines, the travel category would rank 4th among all 12 industries instead of 9th.

• No brand in the travel category improved its category rank in 2026—the most rank-stable industry in the GCBI.

• Air Canada ranked 127th of 130 brands nationally—4th from last in the entire GCBI dataset.

• Flair Airlines declined 1.41 points and carries the largest gender gap of any airline: men rate it 2.91 points higher than women.

The travel category is effectively two industries operating under one label. Hotel brands—Fairmont and Four Seasons—both score above the national average, improved or held on multiple dimensions, and are outperforming the market. Airline brands—all five of them—scored below the national average in 2026, and every one declined year-over-year. The travel category's chronic below-average standing in the GCBI is an airline story, not a travel story.

VIA Rail's position is the category's most analytically interesting finding. A train service outscoring every commercial airline on every GCBI dimension—including Friendliness, Honesty, Sustainability, and Adventurousness—is not a marginal result. It is a consistent and broad-based competitive advantage that the brand's communications do not appear to fully capitalize on. Among Millennials in particular, VIA Rail outscores the best airline (Porter) by 1.57 points.

The hotel subcategory showed something remarkable in 2026: it improved on four of seven dimensions, including Niceness, Respectfulness, and Sustainability—in a year when nearly every brand in the GCBI declined on relational dimensions. Hotels appear to be successfully communicating service quality and sustainability commitments in ways that airlines are not.

• Complete brand rankings table—all 8 brands, with subcategory labels (airline vs. hotel).

• Side-by-side dimension profiles: Hotel subcategory vs. Airline subcategory vs. national average.

• Regional breakdown: Alberta and Atlantic Canada declines, Ontario stability, and the Québec airline anomaly.

• Demographic breakdown: the Millennial airline crisis, VIA Rail's female-skewing profile, income patterns, and political gaps by brand.

• Competitive landscape: the airline race to the bottom and the hotel subcategory's resilience.

• Five strategic implications including VIA Rail's underutilized competitive advantage.