If you fly out of Ottawa, reaching the beaches of Guanacaste is about to get a lot easier. WestJet is adding a direct flight between Ottawa and Guanacaste’s Daniel Oduber Quirós International Airport in Liberia, cutting out the connection through Toronto or the United States that eastern Canadians have long had to accept just to reach Costa Rica’s northern Pacific coast.
The new service starts December 20, 2026, and runs through April 4, 2027. It flies once a week, every Sunday. That day matters more than it might sound. A Sunday out and a Sunday back makes it a clean seven-night stay, so you can plan a full week on the sand without losing two weekends to airports and layovers. For anyone chasing sun through the worst of the Canadian winter, that is the whole appeal.
WestJet will run the route on a Boeing 737 MAX 8 seating 174 passengers, so there is real capacity behind it rather than a token seasonal test. If you want a seat, you can book now — the flights went on sale when WestJet announced the route in late July. If you would rather bundle flight and hotel, Sunwing Vacations is offering Ottawa–Guanacaste packages for the first time, on sale at Sunwing.ca, with the winter package season running November 1, 2026 through April 30, 2027.
Here is the part worth knowing before you shop: you now have two nonstop choices, not one. Porter already flies Ottawa to Liberia weekly through the winter, and with WestJet joining the route, two carriers are chasing the same seats. More competition on a single route tends to work in your favour on price, so it is worth checking both before you commit, and worth booking early if you have fixed weeks in mind — a once-weekly flight sells its high-season Sundays fast, and there is no midweek backup if a date fills up.
The route exists because the demand is already there. Guanacaste Airport says Canadian arrivals jumped 28 percent in the first half of 2026 compared with the same stretch of 2025, and Canada remains Costa Rica’s second-largest source market after the United States. Ottawa has been the gap in that picture — plenty of interest, not much direct lift. This closes it for the high season.
What the route puts within a single flight is the reason snowbirds keep coming back to this corner of the country. Landing in Liberia drops you close to the dry-forest beaches of the Papagayo Peninsula, the surf towns of Tamarindo and Sámara, and the wildlife of the Nicoya Peninsula, without the long domestic transfer that a San José arrival forces on you. For a week in the sun, the northern Pacific is the shortest distance between a parka and a beach chair.
A few practical notes for planning. The season is finite — flights stop after April 4, 2027, so build any spring trip around that last Sunday. Because it is a weekly service, your arrival and departure days are effectively fixed at Sunday, which shapes hotel bookings and rental-car pickups; confirm both align before you lock in flights. And if you are weighing WestJet against Porter, compare not just fare but baggage rules and aircraft, since the two carriers run different cabins on the route.
Bottom line for those of you in Canada is that from this December, you can leave Ottawa on a Sunday morning and be on a Guanacaste beach by afternoon, no layover required.
