Hell no!. I don’t expect anyone to provide a service at a loss. From this thread, it doesn’t sound like Air Canada is saying it will cost $1000 to fly your bike to Edmonton, they are just saying they can’t do it. (regardless of cost)
I’m an engineer. All I do all day is solve problems. Once I solve the technical problem, I then have to figure out how to do it for whatever the budget might be. I’m also keenly aware of marketting. The best customer, is the one you already have.
Airlines, like many companies, spend a squillion $ each year on adveretizing. Advertizing spending has an indirect relationship with sales. (marketting people will try to tell you its a direct relationship, but it isn’t). Triathletes in general are pretty affluent, and travel to races and fly quite a bit. As a target market, we are “whales”. Even if they were to ship a few bikes to the race and only cover costs for the bikes, they’d still be making money on the seat, and of course it’s good advertizing for getting repeat customers. To say they can take some bikes, but not others (regardless of costs) is just silly and short sighted
That said, all they need to do is say something like $200 to ship your bike (to everyone), hire cargo planes if need be, and keep everyone happy, and have returning customers, blah blah blah. At no time did I suggest they should do anything for free, or make a loss at it. They are a business, not a charity afterall.
From this thread, while being Canadian eh, (but living in NZ these days), I won’t look at Air Canada as my first choice, simply because they are a problems company, not a solutions company. I now know it is likely to be problematic to fly with them. It doesn’t matter how many billboards or magazine ads they buy, they’ve gone a long way to losing me as a customer from now on.