Thought I should update you on my adventures booking flights YYZ-ATH. After making the booking above through AC I realized that my return flight from ATH would be pretty tight to make (probably not really achievable) as I'm on a cruise that arrives in ATH at 6:00 am and the flight I booked departed at 8:10 am. Thankfully I realized this before the 24 hour cancellation period was up. Called AC with less than 2 hours left on the cancellation period and actually got the same agent I had dealt with when I originally booked the flights. She was extremely helpful and after some back and forth trying to find better flights I happened to check TK flights while chatting with AC to see if their fares had "improved". Lo and behold I saw great flights that connected through IST that were cheaper than what I had booked with AC. I mentioned this to the AC agent and she said she couldn't book them because they we're all TK so she said she would just cancel my AC flights and I should go ahead and book the TK flights.

Of interest on the TK flights, I discovered that although they don't have a 24-hour free cancellation period, you can choose to reserve your flights and you have at least 24 hours to pay. As per the TK website: "When you book a reservation through Turkish Airlines' ticketing locations, Turkish Airlines' telephone reservations line or Turkish Airlines' website, we will allow you at least 24 hours to ticket the reservation at the quoted fare if the reservation is made one week or more prior to the scheduled flight departure date." In my case they gave me a full week to ticket my reservation!

To summarize, I now have two J tickets YYZ-ATH return at a cost of $2210 per person. What's even better is all flights are on TK B777's in true J class. The other options I had been looking at had the inter-Europe flights on A 320's or 321's in "European J", which as you probably know is just Y with the centre seat blocked.