Originally Posted by SFUVancouver (Post 9702869)

Had a fun time at Pearson on the weekend. Waited 1 hour, 40 minutes for our baggage. The flight was only 2 hours. What a joke of an airport of late.

Finally, at Pearson, when our flight’s luggage took an extraordinary amount of time to arrive, and only in dribbles of one or two bags at a time, a Flair person staffing the nearby lost luggage desk had no explanation, nor any apparent access to a manager or airport liaison to investigate the delay. Our first bag took about 45 minutes to arrive, the second arrived at 1 hour 40 minutes after our flight landed. Things were beginning to get heated between the remaining passengers and the Flair person when we left.

Originally Posted by thenoflyzone (Post 9702607)

I agree that it's very concerning, especially if you're from Ottawa, but YHZ, YQB and YXY have inbound tourism from Europe. YOW has less of that. So that's 1 aspect. It surely explains why DE, AF and 4Y serve those three, but not YOW.

Also, YOW is dependent on AC/LH for long haul service, and AC's priority is on building back its hubs at the moment. No one else will add transatlantic from YOW, unfortunately. TS and WS aren't really interested. So that narrows the field a bit. AC's hubs should be up and running at full steam come next summer, so maybe AC might resume YOW-LHR/FRA come summer 2024.

As for YHZ, there is a strong possibility that WS doesn't resume any of its european destinations from there next summer.

Originally Posted by thewave46 (Post 9702929)

I'm curious if the failure is the baggage handling or the airport. Don't get me wrong, Pearson has a lot of work to do itself, but handling the bags is mostly a responsibility of the airline. Airlines coordinate with their own baggage handlers; the airport has no say there.

I wouldn't fly Flair, especially with bags at this juncture. Honestly, I would desperately try and avoid flying anyone for as long as I can these days, much less through a major hub.

That being said, ULCC operations are sketchy for service at best. You want cheap price, you pay for that. I have minimal patience for misery on my limited vacation time these days.

Somebody wants to burn cash in Canada with all these upstart ULCCs. Into the fire it goes, I suppose.

Originally Posted by SFUVancouver (Post 9702869)

Had a fun time at Pearson on the weekend. Waited 1 hour, 40 minutes for our baggage. The flight was only 2 hours. What a joke of an airport of late.

We also took Flair for the first time. What a joke of an airline, too. We couldn’t check in online because of unspecified system issues but they provided an error code and magnanimous promise to waive the $25 airport check-in desk fee. Then we got an email about 12 hours before the flight saying “your flight has changed” but it didn’t provide any details, just a suggestion to check our reservation at Flair’s website. We tired to do so, but only got a concerning “no reservation found” result to our reservation code/last name search. We then had to use Flair's chat feature and began slogging through the pre-made FAQ prompts to get a person. Pro-tip, if you successfully initiate admittance to the live-person queue by saying "agent", it will confirm that you will speak to someone and gives you an estimated wait time (<15 minutes, so not terrible). Here's the tip, once you are in the queue, the chat will suggest additional self-serve FAQ topics to explore while you wait. If you choose one, it apparently cancels your place in the queue and puts you back to square one to re-request an agent (and new wait time estimate). When we did connect to someone live, there was a delay of up to 5 minutes between typing something and receiving their response. Ultimately, they couldn’t answer any questions about our flight or the itinerary changes but said they would have their system send us an automatically generated updated itinerary, which told us the flight was only delayed by 20 minutes. When I asked why this info wasn’t sent with be original email, which is simply the bare minimum for any itinerary change-related airline communication, and why we were unable to even access our reservation online, they simply ended the chat after a final 5 minute delay.

Arriving at the airport (Winnipeg) ~2.5 hours before the revised departure time, we found a long line for the Flair check-in/bag drop agents, which airport staff were actively managing to avoid clogging the terminal entrance after it snaked out of the holding queue. Based on snippets of overheard conversation it seems like a fair proportion of folks were unable to check in. It also appeared as if Flair hadn't provided any additional check in agents to handle the issue as only half of the check in points were staffed. Furthermore, there was no option to use the airport multi-airline self-serve check in kiosks for Flair to obtain a boarding pass and/or bag drop tags, so everyone who was unable to have checked in and/or just needed a bag drop tag had to wait together. When we eventually got nearly to the head of the line, a staff person was asking everyone if they had checked in (almost universally answered “no”) and they said that the $25 fee would only be waived if people had taken screenshots of their error message. Fortunately, we had. But the lady behind us had not and the agent said “no screen shot, no fee waiver”. I pulled up our screenshot and told the passenger the error code, but the agent sort of glared at me and reiterated that individual passengers had to provide their own screenshots and then moved farther down to the line.

Once on board, I found that my seat was dirty: a big finger-smear of something frosting-like was caked on the rear of the seat in front of me, the overhead reading light and air vent were similarly crusty, and in the seat pocket there was a bit of discarded trash. Otherwise, the in-flight product was a straight-forward LCC.

Finally, at Pearson, when our flight’s luggage took an extraordinary amount of time to arrive, and only in dribbles of one or two bags at a time, a Flair person staffing the nearby lost luggage desk had no explanation, nor any apparent access to a manager or airport liaison to investigate the delay. Our first bag took about 45 minutes to arrive, the second arrived at 1 hour 40 minutes after our flight landed. Things were beginning to get heated between the remaining passengers and the Flair person when we left.

Originally Posted by thewave46 (Post 9702929)

I wouldn't fly Flair, especially with bags at this juncture. Honestly, I would desperately try and avoid flying anyone for as long as I can these days, much less through a major hub.

That being said, ULCC operations are sketchy for service at best. You want cheap price, you pay for that. I have minimal patience for misery on my limited vacation time these days.

Originally Posted by esquire (Post 9703000)

One of the most unforgivable customer service sins by an airline is one I have been reading about more often lately... the dreaded departure time death by a thousand cuts, where your departure gets rolled back half an hour at a time such that your 6 pm departure eventually becomes a midnight departure, before the flight gets cancelled altogether and you are left scrambling for an empty hotel room.

Originally Posted by SFUVancouver (Post 9702869)

Had a fun time at Pearson on the weekend. Waited 1 hour, 40 minutes for our baggage. The flight was only 2 hours. What a joke of an airport of late.

We also took Flair for the first time. What a joke of an airline, too. We couldn’t check in online because of unspecified system issues but they provided an error code and magnanimous promise to waive the $25 airport check-in desk fee. Then we got an email about 12 hours before the flight saying “your flight has changed” but it didn’t provide any details, just a suggestion to check our reservation at Flair’s website. We tired to do so, but only got a concerning “no reservation found” result to our reservation code/last name search. We then had to use Flair's chat feature and began slogging through the pre-made FAQ prompts to get a person. Pro-tip, if you successfully initiate admittance to the live-person queue by saying "agent", it will confirm that you will speak to someone and gives you an estimated wait time (<15 minutes, so not terrible). Here's the tip, once you are in the queue, the chat will suggest additional self-serve FAQ topics to explore while you wait. If you choose one, it apparently cancels your place in the queue and puts you back to square one to re-request an agent (and new wait time estimate). When we did connect to someone live, there was a delay of up to 5 minutes between typing something and receiving their response. Ultimately, they couldn’t answer any questions about our flight or the itinerary changes but said they would have their system send us an automatically generated updated itinerary, which told us the flight was only delayed by 20 minutes. When I asked why this info wasn’t sent with be original email, which is simply the bare minimum for any itinerary change-related airline communication, and why we were unable to even access our reservation online, they simply ended the chat after a final 5 minute delay.

Arriving at the airport (Winnipeg) ~2.5 hours before the revised departure time, we found a long line for the Flair check-in/bag drop agents, which airport staff were actively managing to avoid clogging the terminal entrance after it snaked out of the holding queue. Based on snippets of overheard conversation it seems like a fair proportion of folks were unable to check in. It also appeared as if Flair hadn't provided any additional check in agents to handle the issue as only half of the check in points were staffed. Furthermore, there was no option to use the airport multi-airline self-serve check in kiosks for Flair to obtain a boarding pass and/or bag drop tags, so everyone who was unable to have checked in and/or just needed a bag drop tag had to wait together. When we eventually got nearly to the head of the line, a staff person was asking everyone if they had checked in (almost universally answered “no”) and they said that the $25 fee would only be waived if people had taken screenshots of their error message. Fortunately, we had. But the lady behind us had not and the agent said “no screen shot, no fee waiver”. I pulled up our screenshot and told the passenger the error code, but the agent sort of glared at me and reiterated that individual passengers had to provide their own screenshots and then moved farther down to the line.

Once on board, I found that my seat was dirty: a big finger-smear of something frosting-like was caked on the rear of the seat in front of me, the overhead reading light and air vent were similarly crusty, and in the seat pocket there was a bit of discarded trash. Otherwise, the in-flight product was a straight-forward LCC.

Finally, at Pearson, when our flight’s luggage took an extraordinary amount of time to arrive, and only in dribbles of one or two bags at a time, a Flair person staffing the nearby lost luggage desk had no explanation, nor any apparent access to a manager or airport liaison to investigate the delay. Our first bag took about 45 minutes to arrive, the second arrived at 1 hour 40 minutes after our flight landed. Things were beginning to get heated between the remaining passengers and the Flair person when we left.

Originally Posted by SFUVancouver (Post 9702939)

I agree entirely with you aversion to flying these days, much less with a low-cost carrier. This was leisure travel to the family cabin, so we had pretty high tolerance for airport/airline delay nonsense (e.g. no connecting flights, no specific arrival time, no meetings, etc.) and a couple of airline credits for a cancelled work trip that we wanted to use up ASAP. With that said, I just didn't think very much of Flair from this, our first experience, and would not likely choose them again in the future. It's not that things went wrong, per se, but rather how they handled them (or didn't).

Originally Posted by manny_santos (Post 9703081)

And then there was this incident with Swoop, another ULCC:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...ight-1.6550377

Some might argue that these people are trying to "pull the race card", but their story was collaborated by a passenger in another row, and the non-POC passenger who agreed to the seat swap didn't get asked to leave the plane.

Originally Posted by manny_santos (Post 9703077)

I have never flown Flair and probably never will. Their reservation system doesn't accept spaces in the Last Name field; my legal name as it appears on my passport contains a space, so I'm not taking any chances not entering it. None of the other airlines I've flown with have this problem with my name.

I flagged this to them over a year ago and they've never fixed it. That tells me everything I need to know about that airline.

Originally Posted by manny_santos (Post 9703077)

I have never flown Flair and probably never will. Their reservation system doesn't accept spaces in the Last Name field; my legal name as it appears on my passport contains a space, so I'm not taking any chances not entering it. None of the other airlines I've flown with have this problem with my name.

I flagged this to them over a year ago and they've never fixed it. That tells me everything I need to know about that airline.

Originally Posted by esquire (Post 9703000)

One of the most unforgivable customer service sins by an airline is one I have been reading about more often lately... the dreaded departure time death by a thousand cuts, where your departure gets rolled back half an hour at a time such that your 6 pm departure eventually becomes a midnight departure, before the flight gets cancelled altogether and you are left scrambling for an empty hotel room.

Stuff like this is absolute horse shit:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manit...gers-1.6544249

Originally Posted by Denscity (Post 9702993)

Vancouver seems to have no problems. Toronto and maybe Montreal is still best to avoid.

Originally Posted by casper (Post 9703098)

When I read these stories I always think of this video....

Originally Posted by Dominion301 (Post 9702937)

It would be rather shocking if WS pulls out of the YHZ-transatlantic market. If that were to happen, I wonder what would happen to the LGW slot?

Originally Posted by samuelx88 (Post 9703110)

I never got any problem with adding a space in the last name field with Flair. What happens when you try it? Is it on their website or in the app?

Originally Posted by nname (Post 9703603)

Looks like AC is increasing YYZ-DXB to 6x weekly this winter.

Wonder if EK is going to do the same, or split the service into multiple routes.

Originally Posted by Calfan12 (Post 9703060)

WS 787 service for YVR is now year round.