Originally Posted by TravellingChris
Travelers will do a lot for savings on fares. For example, we've done the long layover plenty of times in Seoul. Our routings often involved leaving SE Asia at night and arriving at Incheon in the morning, whereupon there was an 9 or 10 hour wait until the evening Air Canada flight to Vancouver.
I would love to discuss this at greater length but I have a crazy week, so I can only check in randomly. We will have to agree to disagree: OK I'm not a great fan of AC to start with and it is not AC's fault but the airside experience at YYZ and YUL is well below what I normally experience in the US. I have not been in YVR since pandemic and things could have improved.
Most travellers do not have lounge access and I agree that some are super price sensitive but very few will choose to have a very long layover: price sensitive travellers are unlikely to plan 8 hours in YYZ unless you plan something around your layover, which presumably would be difficult if they are on a tight budget. I cannot avoid thinking that Canadian airports are designed to maximize the revenues of franchisees rather than make the travel experience enjoyable.
YYZ is particularly frustrating if you need to change terminals: the train should have been built airside but management was too cheap to do this right. The result is that it's very inconvenient to connect to a BA or KL flight - not AC problem but certainly a YYZ problem. Sure Porter flies to T3 where other airlines are based but that's not currently super helpful if you live in - say -YTS. At any rate, AC has issues with scheduling domestic flights for convenient connections, so imagine international flights. Basically, if you depend on Jazz or Rouge service to get you to a hub, you can bet you don't have a lot of schedule choices, and matters are made worse if you need to go via YYZ or YUL. As a specific example a colleague had to wait 6 hours (a month or so ago) in YYZ coming back from VIE and going to YQT, which at that time had no YYZ-YQT past 11am. Last year, there was no YQT-YYZ before 11am. For these price-sensitive travellers, finding good power outlets is pretty important (especially if you have kinds and need to recharge some game/tablet/other devices) and a good proportion of outlets in YYZ just don't work. YUL is in similar shape.
Both have pretty deplorable and overpriced food options. I was last in YYZ on Thursday evening and pasta with a sparkling water (no alcool) set me back $40 including tip. I suppose if you are from the US then the exchange rate works in your favor but under no circ*mstances was this a $40-meal. On the other hands, the food options at major US hubs are much more diverse. I don't usually do McD or TGIF but at least it doesn't cost you upwards of $40/person. MSP has (or at least used to have) a nice rest area in some tucked away corner; there was one in YYZ at some point (sponsored by CIBC IIRC?) with good chairs but it's now dismantled. The list of small things that make YYZ and YUL a hassle compared to a typical US hub is very long, including this extremely long walk between the domestic and international terminals or international terminals to immigration, or this new thing they concocted in T3 to access the far ramps from where WJ used to operate. Most of this non-sense is absent in ATL or IAH or even MSP and DTW. (I'm leaving EWR out of the picture for obvious reasons).
I do not travel that much compared to others, but I travel enough to Mexico to claim with certainly that YYZ is extremely rarely on the map for pax originating from Mexico and even less frequently for pax originating south of Mexico: it's just too much of a detour. AM is expanding its international network to Europe and they are more likely than AC to scoop up this traffic either through their own metal or through alliance codeshares (AM timings ex-Europe to MEX are very weird). I do believe that YYZ and to a much lesser extent YUL can serve as connectors for some pax originating in the US going to selected cities but I'm also convinced that the well-deserved poor reputation of Canadian airports does not help in any way.
