If there’s one thing the new CEO of Flair Airlines wants is for customers to give them a second chance.
“I’m well aware that there are many customers that have tried us once,” says Maciej Wilk, CEO of Flair, “and said never more.”
The budget airline has been buffeted by bad reviews, with customer complaints about service, reliability and lack of amenities, just to name a few criticisms.
“I would like to cordially ask all these passengers to give us another try because we’ve changed,” he adds. “We are not the same airline and I think this time we are really worth their trust.”
To that end, after being made permanent CEO in July, Wilk is ready to tell his and Flair’s story, the airline he joined just two years ago.
The 41-old-executive spoke from his native Poland, where he’d travelled for family business.
“I was born in the ‘80s, during the really difficult times of the communism era,” says Wilk.
He still remembers, if vaguely as a five-year-old, the country’s first partially democratic elections in 1989 since the Second World War.
Solidarity, the trade union party led by Lech Wałęsa, won all the seats the Polish Communist Party allowed it to vie for in the lower house and all but one seat in the Senate.
Those elections, a flashpoint in the fall of the Soviet empire across Europe, left Poland struggling to get back on its feet, hobbled by high inflation and double digit unemployment.
In the past three decades things have changed, and Wilk says he now doesn’t see much difference between Poland and Canada.
“When I come back here, I’m really proud to observe that the comfort of life, the level of goods and services available in Poland are exactly the same as in Canada,” says Wilk. “There’s no visible difference. I can see how much the country has developed over this last 35 years.”
Wilk came by his drive to enter the world of business naturally with both parents being entrepreneurs.
Their medical equipment import-export business provided the family with enough money for luxuries like travel abroad, a rarity he said for many other Poles in his generation.
After graduating in 2008 from the University of Warsaw with a master of arts degree in economics, Wilk went to work as a manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
He then joined LOT Polish Airlines in 2013 and was named chief operating officer five years later.
By the time Flair came calling, living abroad was already top of mind.
“I figured that it would be interesting to see how it is to live abroad, get a taste of an expat life. When the opportunity came, I didn’t hesitate much,” Wilk says. “Back then I was 39. My wife had a baby. She was on her maternity leave so everything clicked. It was the right time to make a move.”
He joined Flair in February of 2023 as chief operating officer. By then, the company had already weathered several storms.
In 2022, the airline had to prove it was Canadian-owned after complaints to the Canadian Transportation Agency that a U.S.-based investor, 777 Partners, had dominant control — a violation of Canadian foreign ownership laws.
In 2023, the airline had four planes seized over nonpayment of leases guaranteed by firms associated with 777 Partners.
Wilk says Flair is not connected with 777 Partners in any way, now, and that the perception of the airline has changed dramatically — for the better.
At an aircraft leasing conference last week, he says he had “15 meetings in two days with all the major lessors. The climate is completely different,” says Wilk. “Nobody remembers anymore about the repos. Everyone wants to do business with us right now.”
The company also has millions in unpaid back taxes owed to the CRA, and Wilk says they have set up a payment plan with the government agency.
Within about a year of Wilk joining Flair, the budget airline hadn’t quite risen like a phoenix from the ashes, but it had survived a short-lived battle with ultra low-cost rivals Swoop and Lynx, both of which ceased operations in 2023 and 2024 respectively.
The airlines were “competing for exactly the same passenger doing exactly the same thing. Clearly that was too much for Canada,” says Wilk. “We had to play this death match to the end. And to the surprise of many, Flair had become the last man in this struggle.”
At the time, a passenger interviewed by CBC on a Lynx flight that was cancelled when the airline shut down questioned whether budget airlines could make it in Canada.
Wilk, who became interim CEO in July last year after former CEO Stephen Jones retired, wondered that himself.
“We quickly realized that the previous strategy was all about replicating the European ULCC (ultralow cost carrier) model,” says Wilk. “It was an attempt to build another Ryanair or Wizard, that I’m so familiar with, in Canada.
“But Canada is different. It has its own sets of challenges that makes it really impossible to replicate the European ULCC model with success.”
One problem, he says, is that most major cities in Europe have two or three airports, including secondary airports with basic infrastructure, that keep costs low.
Canada has only a handful of similar airports, says Wilk. Europe also has nearly 20 times the population and hundreds and hundreds of routes, he says — often with no competition.
“All of this brought me to a realization, together with the team,” says Wilk, “that in order really to succeed, we need to drop this ULCC dogma.”
Eric Tanner, Flair’s chief commercial officer, says Wilk was a good fit for the CEO job because the airline is “very lean and agile,” and because of that, it requires “leaders who cannot only show bold strategic thinking but are also able to roll up their sleeves and do the work.
“Maciej had a long track record of success at LOT Polish Airlines and, from day one, has demonstrated his ability to exceed the requirements of this demanding job.”
Flair has recently adopted a new business model called Flair FWD, that Wilk said will maximize value and still allow it to compete on price.
”The product is not that different from the others,” he said, referring to large airlines like Air Canada and WestJet. “However, we want to make it as easy financially, emotionally, and physically as possible.
“We will never be offering lounges and glassware and free Wi-Fi on board,” he said. “However we want to specialize in providing reliable service on an unbeatable price level.”
