Icelandic discount airline PLAY is pulling out of Canada less than two years after launching, according to a report in the Toronto Star.
PLAY launched its Canadian business in the summer of 2023, flying from Hamilton’s John C. Munro Airport to European cities, like London, Paris and Berlin, via its hub in Reykjavik.
The carrier’s inaugural flights from Hamilton, ON began in June 2023 with tickets as low as $169 to 13 destinations in Europe. The airline’s last major announcement was in August last year – a new route, connecting Hamilton, ON, with Faro, Portugal via Iceland, for April 2025.
The airline had also recently signed a multi-year distribution agreement with Sabre.
But operations in Canada, it seems, won’t be active that much longer. The airline recently informed airport officials that its last flight out of Hamilton will be on April 22, The Star reports.
“I can confirm that, unfortunately, Play Airlines will end its service from John C. Munro Hamilton International Airport as of April 22, 2025,” airport spokesperson Colleen Ryan told The Star in an emailed statement. “While we are disappointed with this decision, we remain confident in the future of Hamilton International.”
Travellers face uncertainty
Travellers who booked flights with PLAY that depart after April 22 now face uncertainty. In its story, The Star spoke to one woman who had been planning a trip to Iceland and Germany for this summer, and had booked car reservations as well as accommodations.
Finding an alternative for her flights to Reykjavik and then Hamburg may come with added costs, she said. The customer is worried she’ll lose the money on the arrangements she booked if she can’t secure an affordable option.
The traveller goes on to say that she only noticed her May flight with PLAY had been cancelled when she doubled checked her flight schedule online. She said PLAY has not yet provided her with any direction on what to do.
Passengers in this situation are entitled to be rebooked on another flight, as mandated by Canada’s Air Passenger Protection Regulations, passenger rights advocate Gabor Lukacs told The Star.
After sharing mediocre financial results in October, PLAY’s CEO Einar Orn Olafsson said the airline’s “hub and spoke” model of flying people from North America into Reykjavik, and then onwards to other European destinations, wasn’t performing as well as originally hoped.
Flying travellers between Southern Europe and Iceland was proving to be a more successful model, he said at the time.
PLAY’s exit from Canada comes nearly one year after Canadian low-cost carrier Lynx Air filed for creditor protection in February of 2024. WestJet’s budget airline, Swoop, folded into its mainline operations in 2023.
Canada Jetlines, a leisure carrier that sold affordable flights to places like Orlando, Cancun and Jamaica, also shuttered last August.
PLAY was founded in July 2019 as WAB Air (We Are Back) by former Wow Air executives Arnar Már Magnússon and Sveinn Ingi Steinþórsson.
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