How We’re Helping You Travel to Our Major Events

by Sachin Kotecha, Events Director

Cover photo: A flight out of our 2018 National Championship airport. Where could it be?

In Canada, quidditch is mainly played by university students. As such, one of the biggest barriers each year is the cost of travel to our Major Events. As Quidditch Canada moves its Major Events announcement date up each season, we provide more opportunities for teams to secure cheaper travel. With tomorrow’s impending announcement, I want to talk a bit about travel as well as share some news with you.

What does Quidditch Canada do in terms of travel?

• We put our events in cities that are most accessible in terms of air travel. This year’s National Championship is in a city whose airport is serviced by all three major Canadian airlines: Air Canada, WestJet, and NewLeaf, a new budget carrier. We encourage you to start looking at fares starting tomorrow! This year’s Western Regional Championship is also in a city whose airport is serviced by multiple airlines.
• We work with city partners to leverage connections with airlines that fly into the local airport. We’re actively working on seeking rates that could be cheaper than you can find online all the time. In the past we have also tried seeking sponsorship agreements.
• We network! I will be heading to Ottawa next month as one of 50 youth across the country who will have the opportunity to meet with government officials and representatives from the accommodations, food and beverage, recreation and entertainment, transportation, and travel services sectors. This will be a unique opportunity to bring up the barriers our young sport faces due to the sometimes prohibitive cost of travel for university-aged members.
• We try to limit your on-the-ground costs. Last season in Victoria, Quidditch Canada arranged airport transfers in coordination with the local team. We also ran shuttles from the partner hotel to the facility. These are some of the things your events fees can go towards. Overall I heard overwhelmingly positive feedback from teams about these services, so we will look into seeing if we can do the same thing (within budget) at this year’s National Championship.

In addition to the efforts I’ve just mentioned, this year Quidditch Canada has forged a relationship with Flight Centre’s Lindsay Smith. Lindsay has a great deal of experience with sports-related travel groups. Teams will have the opportunity to work with Lindsay should they choose (you are not obligated to!) to find group rates for travel for the upcoming season. The larger the group you can put together the better the rates that Lindsay will be able to secure you – so pair up with another team or two! Flight Centre has an expansive network so we hope that you can find some great rates with them that you may not otherwise find. Feel free to reach out to Lindsay at lindsay.smith@flightcentre.ca.

I wish you luck with your travel plans this season and I hope we see you on the pitch! See if you can guess where Nationals will be this season just from the cover photo of this blog. If you can’t, there’s not much longer to wait – news will drop at noon Eastern Time tomorrow.