gcashin

Good news and thanks for sharing. Unfortunate it doesn't extend to UA metal, given that UA does most of the heavy lifting on U.S. business routes (IAH, SFO, ORD, DEN), but it's a start at least.

pewpew

I feel like AC doesn't understand how contract lounges work... From *A:

FlyerJ

But your quote would indicate that an AC contracted lounge only provides access to pax traveling on AC metal, no??

"... by the member airline on which you are traveling."

I'm not sure how they're dealing with *A members who are flying on AC metal, only because I didn't ask. I'd assume - based I the T&C you quoted - that *A Gold members would get access here provided that they're flying on AC metal.

But, no access if you're flying on UA ... because UA hasn't contracted with this lounge.

pewpew

Oh I thought you meant star alliance reciprocity = no entry for *G. Guess i was just looking for a reason to complain about AC

canadiancow

It could be that your source didn't know or clarify the rules.

When AC operated out of both A and G gates at SFO, the contract Air France lounge was accessible to J and *G, traveling on AC metal.

So *G on AC may be allowed in, but it sounds like AC*G on UA will not (which makes sense).

cur

medium to small sized eu cities like prg, krk.

but that's out of necessity (not enough gates) than novelty

coleo

I used the Aspire lounge a couple weeks ago and am in here now with my AMEX Platinum. It is much better than the other US departures lounge in the old YYC terminal, eggs and such for breakfast, good coffee, nice tables/work stations. The other night I was here and the dinner option was fine as well. I guess this is as good as it gets, not that much of a difference from AC aside from self serve bar. 100x better than any united lounge I've ever been to.

FlyerJ

I need to take back part of my earlier positive review of the transborder Aspire lounge after my most recent (#3) visit.

It was my first evening visit, so there were different food options and I was looking for different beverages!

- Space is still beautiful
- the 20 or so lounge chairs are still the best chairs ever

But...

• The hot food was supposed to be butter chicken and rice. For almost my entire 1 hr 20 min in the lounge, the empty containers just sat there in the little buffet area. I asked a few times if more was coming, and kept getting told "yes, any minute now". They just sat there -- empty. After a full hour, it was finally replenished ... but then everyone in the lounge lept to get food. The new food trays were scraped bare in mere minutes. Big service fail. Or maybe they're rationing too little food for the lounge. Not impressed.
• Oddly, no food is labeled. Sure most was pretty self-evident, but the big bowl of white, sweet yogurt beside the bowl of undressed salad looked remarkably like salad dressing. A bit of a shock when my salad tastes more like breakfast than salad.
• The liquor selection is nice. The wine selection is AWFUL. Totally low end plonk! The one and only (hmm, that's also a problem) red is a garbage wine called "Apothic" -- more commonly known by its nickname "Apothetic". This is the executive lounge, not a diner in a strip mall. Put at least a couple of options in there, and something that's appealing or interesting.
• In the mens' room: (1) the toilet stall lock is broken, so the door couldn't be locked, and (2) the toilet seat in the same stall was barely attached to the toilet. There's either no maintenance for this place, or the staff forgot to call!
  Also in the mens' room ... there are boxes of Kleenex (makes sense) but absolutely no garbage cans anywhere, so nowhere to dispose of said Kleenex (what the??). As a result, people had left balls of used tissues in a variety of places-- most commonly on a small ledge by the entrance.

Get your act together, YYC folks. It was a poor lounge experience.

WR Cage

Globa and mail article on YYC new CEO Bob Sartor.

https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/sec.t...0/?service=amp

cur

i've personally met sartor. he is sharp and someone whose from outside the yyc silo is good. but his answer on pax experience is a bit shallow: the airport has only external customers, it has internal customers; the "carriers", employees, lounge and retail owners. if you don't engage with them then it's hard to engage with the externals too. and yyc seems to ignore the fact that the "carriers" are actually customers. mind you these answers were edited and condensed. a few years ago calgary police were hiding out from a distance then driving up and handing out tickets to employees who would take a direct route to the terminal along the road instead of making a 300m detour away from and around the terminal. i mean you can't say employees will have high morale when airport executives allow stupidness like that to exist. http://www.metronews.ca/news/calgary...aywalking.html

also really over the continuation of the "oh it's federally regulated thing, nothing we can do" re catsa. uh the airports can band together and lobby for change. this "nothing we can do" mentality will only make catsa and transport canada more out of control/worse. wait times get worse and screeners in calgary are overtly rude and provocative, and are notorious for passive aggressive slowdowns.

so it'll prob be more of the same but with flashier advertising.

lespoir

His hiring is a joke...

Stranger

Can't we just give the guy a chance?

1Newflyer

He already got a chance by being hired. What about the passengers and taxpayers, don't they deserve the same?

quantumofforce

Haven't been to YYC, but from what I hear, good luck fixing the gate experience.

Diabeetus

This morning (Sunday at 5:30am) I went through YYC Transborder.

1) Parking
Pro: the new parking lot has plenty of space
Con: walking from the parking lot to the departure level is only possible across one small walkway from a corner of the lot.

2) Security and Customs
- This went very quick and smoothly. The Nexus line for sercurity screening does rejoin with the general line, but there were very few people there. There were plenty of global entry machines.
- A lot less walking than the old TB area.
- There were a lot of young Catsa staff. They all seemed to try to speed the security process along.

3) Duty Free
- It does form a mandatory bottle neck coming out of Customs as pax would stop and gawk at the wares for sale.

4) Central holding area
- plenty of seating. I can see the advantage of having all the retail outlets in one spot.

5) Aspire lounge
- I was on a UA J ticket, so I did not get try the lounge.

6) The "long" walk down to the gates (call-to-gate system)
- I was expecting some long horrible walk to the gates. It's not bad at all. It's much shorter than the main pier at YYZ T1 domestic.
- Seriously, the walk is short.
- The time estimates on the signs to walk to the gates are overestimates, for people either taking their time or with mobility issues.

7) UA had 3 boarding lines: Zone 1, Zone 2, and Zone 3-5. I was in zone 1, so getting overhead bin space wasn't an issue.

So the two main things I noticed, in contrast to earlier comments:

1) Security and customs was fast. Faster than the old terminal. (Caveat: Sunday at 5:30am)

2) The walk to the gates isn't that long. Most international airports have far longer walks to the gates. Maybe it is because I'm a "younger" traveler with no mobility issues, but the call-to-gate system seems fine to me.