Manitobans looking for a southern destination to escape this coming winter's cold will have fewer options.

WestJet has announced it is suspending a number of direct flights from Winnipeg to popular sun destinations, including to Phoenix, Las Vegas, Cancun and Puerto Vallarta.

It is also cutting the number of flights to Palm Springs.

The airline says the issue is with the grounding by international transportation regulatory bodies of the Boeing 737 Max 8, a commercial passenger jet involved in two major crashes.

A total of 346 people were killed in the crashes involving Indonesia's Lion Air in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines in March of this year.

Boeing has acknowledged the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, designed to activate automatically to help keep a plane stable, seemed to be a factor in each crash. It appears erroneous air speed data triggered the system, which pushed the nose of the jets down to increase speed while the pilots fought to counteract it.

Boeing is working to fix the problem and prove to aviation officials that the aircraft is safe, but it is not clear yet when the Max 8s will be cleared to fly again.

Air Canada and Sunwing have already announced they won't be flying their Max 8s until next year.

WestJet says the suspended flights — which include several others across the country — will be back in service once the jets are allowed back in the air.

In the meantime, the following changes are being made:

Winnipeg-Phoenix: two weekly flights suspended.

Winnipeg-Palm Springs: will operate once weekly instead of twice weekly.

Winnipeg-Las Vegas: two weekly flights suspended.

Winnipeg-Cancun: three weekly flights suspended.

Winnipeg-Puerto Vallarta: three weekly flights in December suspended.

"Any route suspensions are temporary, and WestJet remains committed to resuming these flights once our Max fleet returns to service," an emailed statement from the company says.

Where possible, the company is trying to substitute other aircraft on routes that were served by the Max series.

"WestJet teams across our network continue to work day and night to protect our guests' travel plans, which is especially important during the busy holiday travel period," the statement says.

"Since the day the skies closed to the Max on March 13, 2019, we have maintained 98 per cent of our total planned departures."