Puerto Vallarta’s main gateway is getting a fresh wave of attention from Canada this winter as Porter Airlines launches nonstop service from Toronto and prepares to add flights from Ottawa and Hamilton.
The new seasonal route between Toronto Pearson (YYZ) and Puerto Vallarta (PVR) began in mid-November with three weekly round-trips and is scheduled to increase to five per week in December. The inaugural arrival touched down on the Jalisco coast with 132 passengers on board, greeted by state and municipal officials and airport authorities during a brief ceremony on the tarmac.
Porter is using its Embraer E195-E2 aircraft on the route, a 132-seat jet with a two-by-two cabin layout that eliminates middle seats. Once the Ottawa and Hamilton services come online later in December, the airline expects to add roughly 3,700 inbound seats per month into Puerto Vallarta, focused squarely on the high-season rush of Canadian sun seekers.
For Jalisco tourism officials, the move is less about a single plane and more about a fast-strengthening link with Canada. They note that Porter’s flights join 17 existing routes from Canadian cities served by six carriers, and say Canadian visitor arrivals to the state are already running about eight percent higher than last year. That momentum, they argue, is strong enough that Puerto Vallarta’s airport could surpass 6.8 million passengers by the end of 2025.
Puerto Vallarta airport growth tied to Canada
The 6.8 million figure is not just a round number. According to recent traffic data, Puerto Vallarta’s Gustavo Díaz Ordaz International Airport handled about 6.8 million passengers in 2024, making it one of Mexico’s busiest airports and the main international entry point for the broader Bahía de Banderas region. That total was slightly higher than in 2023, even before the current wave of new routes scheduled for 2025 and 2026.
Canada has played an outsized role in that growth. Federal tourism statistics show that 1.6 million Canadian air passengers arrived in Mexico between January and May 2025, a year-on-year increase of about 4.5 percent, with most of those travellers funneled through a small group of resort and gateway airports that includes Puerto Vallarta. Within that larger trend, Jalisco officials point out that their own Canadian market is expanding faster than the national average, helped by strong repeat traffic from Western Canada and Ontario.
At Puerto Vallarta’s airport, that demand shows up in the route map. Direct flights from Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and Toronto already rank among the busiest international connections for the terminal. The addition of Porter’s Toronto service, followed by nonstop flights from Ottawa and Hamilton, gives Ontario travellers more choice of departure airport and schedule while reinforcing the city’s status as a preferred Pacific coast escape.
The infrastructure is shifting to match. A long-planned expansion is bringing a second terminal to Puerto Vallarta, with construction underway since late 2022. The new facility, expected to begin operating in stages in 2025 and reach full use in 2026, will add about 68,000 square metres of space—roughly a 150-percent increase over the existing terminal. It has been designed as a zero-energy building, with systems meant to sharply reduce power and water use, while also expanding immigration and customs areas that have often been a pressure point during peak arrivals.
Airport planners and tourism officials estimate that once the new terminal is fully online, it could help lift annual visitor numbers to the region by 10 to 15 percent in its first year of full operation. For a destination that already crossed the 6.8-million-passenger threshold, even a share of that projected bump would translate into hundreds of thousands of additional arrivals.
What more traffic means on the ground
Behind the percentages and forecasts are practical changes for travellers and residents. For Canadians, the immediate impact of the new Porter service is simple: there are more ways to get to the bay without a connection, and more flexibility on travel days during a season when seats to Mexico can sell out quickly. The airline pitches its Toronto–Puerto Vallarta route on comfort, highlighting the absence of middle seats and onboard perks that include complimentary Wi-Fi and drinks.
For Puerto Vallarta, the picture is broader. More Canadian routes deepen the city’s dependence on one of its most reliable winter markets; at the same time, national tourism patterns are shifting. While overall foreign arrivals by air to Mexico have softened slightly compared with last year, Canadian passenger numbers continue to rise, and authorities say Cancun, Puerto Vallarta, and a handful of other airports now concentrate the vast majority of those visitors.
That concentration raises familiar questions about how much growth the region can absorb, even with a new terminal coming online. Local officials argue that the expansion is precisely about staying ahead of demand—shortening immigration lines, easing bottlenecks at security and check-in, and spreading traffic more evenly across the day. Hoteliers and tour operators, for their part, see the extra Canadian capacity as a chance to lock in repeat visitors who travel every winter and increasingly look beyond all-inclusive resorts to explore neighbourhoods, restaurants, and nearby towns.
In that context, Porter’s arrival is both a symbolic and practical milestone. Symbolic because it shows that newer Canadian carriers now see Puerto Vallarta as a core part of their winter “sun” networks, not just an optional add-on behind bigger hubs. Practical because each new route and departure city makes it easier for first-time visitors—from Toronto suburbs, from Ottawa, from Hamilton and the surrounding region—to choose the bay over competing destinations across the Caribbean and Mexico.
Whether the airport finishes 2025 above the 6.8-million-passenger mark will depend on the strength of the coming high season and how global demand behaves over the next year. For now, though, the message from officials and airlines is clear: Puerto Vallarta is betting on sustained Canadian demand, and Canada is answering with more planes pointed straight at the Pacific.
