Air Transat and VIA Rail Canada are pleased to announce that they have formed an intermodal partnership, enabling Canadians to take advantage of both rail and air services when travelling between their home, the airport and their vacation destination.

As a result, Air Transat and VIA Rail have streamlined their service schedules to encourage the purchase of tickets combining both modes of transportation. Customers are invited to book both their international flight as well as their train ticket (connecting them to the airport) online, quickly and easily. To facilitate the shopping process, a dedicated page has been created on Air Transat’s website under the car rental and train travel booking section.

"Thanks to this partnership, Transat is making vacations even more accessible to Canadians and is allowing its customers to expand upon travel destination opportunities by conducting a rail transfer to one of its main departure cities. Transat is offering vacations to over 50 destinations in the South and in Europe departing from over 20 Canadian cities, and today's announcement once again allows us to meet our customers' expectations and modernize our offer", stated Joseph Adamo, Vice-President of Marketing, Transat Canada.

This agreement is the latest in a series of measures taken by VIA Rail to modernize Canadian passenger rail. In the last two years, VIA Rail has entered into numerous intermodal partnerships. To celebrate this announcement, a 10% discount will be offered on the best available fare until October 31, 2012 for VIA Rail tickets purchased through Air Transat's site. As well, passengers can take advantage of the free AirConnect shuttle providing easy and quick transfer between VIA’s Dorval station and Montre´al’s Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau International Airport.

“This announcement is in line with VIA Rail’s strategy of creating synergy among carriers in order to enhance the client experience and facilitate intermodal travel”, said Marc Laliberte´, VIA Rail’s President and CEO. “Today’s announcement is driven by our ongoing effort to improve our services. This strategy demonstrates that by working together, passenger carriers can increase the mobility of all Canadians while increasing the number of passengers for all methods of transport.”

“We are delighted to be partnering with Air Transat, a well-respected company that has been using innovation for decades to carve out its position among the leading airlines in the world”, added Steve Del Bosco, Chief Marketing and Sales Officer at VIA Rail. “Not only does this partnership provide our clients with the option of using the airport of their choice, it also meets their need for safe, reliable and affordable modes of transportation as they travel the considerable distance between their home and their chosen airport.”

Over the course of the last two years, VIA Rail has implemented a strategy involving the creation of intermodal synergies aimed at improving the interconnectivity with other passenger carriers across the country. To date, this strategy has led to partnerships with major urban transportation companies in Montréal and Toronto (Agence métropolitaine de transport in Montreal and GO Transit in Toronto), and three motor coach transportation companies operating in Western Canada, the City of Toronto, and the Maritimes region. VIA has also signed an agreement with Amtrak, a company that specializes in train services in the US, for travel between Toronto and New York.

As Canada’s national passenger rail service, VIA Rail Canada has a mandate to provide Canadian travellers with safe, efficient, and cost-effective passenger transportation services in the country’s two official languages. VIA operates intercity, regional and transcontinental train services linking 450 communities through its 12,500-kilometre network. Winner of the 2011 RAC Safety Award, VIA Rail safely transports more than four million passengers annually. In 2007, the Government of Canada invested almost a billion dollars in VIA Rail. Follow our transformation at viarail.ca/TransformingVIA.

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Air Transat is Canada’s leading holiday travel airline. Every year, it carries some 3 million passengers to nearly 60 destinations in 25 countries aboard its fleet of Airbus wide-body jets. The company employs approximately 2,000 people. Air Transat is a business unit of Transat A.T. Inc., an integrated international tour operator with more than 60 destination countries and that distributes products in over 50 countries.