After a good night of rest at the Hampton Inn Schiphol Airport in Hoofdorp (our favourite Schiphol airport hotel when you factor price/convenience), we took our “usual 4-minute train ride” to the Schiphol airport terminal and conveniently reached the airport at 10 O’clock. I made sure to check when I woke up if the inbound flight AC826 actually took off from Toronto and was happy to see it was on it’s way to Amsterdam, although it took off almost 3 hours late.






Departure board AMS


AC Priority check in



Air Canada check-in counters are located in the departures 3 section of AMS, and we used the empty business class lane to register our bags. I took this opportunity to ask the friendly agent to update my frequent flyer number to my Aegean one as for whatever reason the system was stuck with my useless Lufthansa miles and less account number with no possibility to change it myself (probably because I added it to my Expedia profile 10 years ago…). It took a few minutes to the agent to do so as there were issues on her side too, but it eventually worked out and the A3 membership was shown on the BP. Afterwards, I asked her if there were any travel alerts for our next flight to SCL (the next day), as I wanted to get more confidence we would not get stuck in Toronto. And this is where things got a bit complicated as she could not find the next flights on our booking (she managed to find the flights after a few minutes though and after providing her the PNR and after explaining her that there was a schedule change 3 months ago when Air Canada decided to cancel the Monday evening departure to SCL) but she eventually asked her supervisor to come over, and he started to make some calls. Although I speak and understand a bit Dutch, I could not grasp the full outcome of the phone discussion, and was started to get afraid that something was wrong with our booking. But there was actually nothing to worry about and all their efforts was actually to get the boarding pass for the next segment printed out, which was not possible as we were more than 24 hours before departure.


Bags in...


...Boarding pass out

After 10 minutes or so, we got our passports and boarding passes back. All agents clearly had the best intentions, but unfortunately, this was another example that a lot of knowledgeable and experienced staff left the aviation sector since COVID, I guess it will take months if not years to fully train everyone again…

We used the priority security which took only 5 minutes to clear (regular security had a waiting time of maybe 20-30 min) and the passport control was, for once in Schiphol, quite fast as it took only 5 minutes using the e-gates to exit the Schengen area.


AMS non-Schengen area


Happy to be there !


AMS by day, with the KLM "Orange Pride" 777-300 in the background

We then walked a bit to the Aspire lounge, which was getting crowded and where there was a bit of a line to enter. There is clearly a lack of lounges in AMS, especially in the non-Schengen area, and this lounge serves most of the non-SkyTeam airlines and also a bunch of membership programs such as Priority Pass.


Aspire lounge AMS non-Schengen

It was clearly rush hour there, but we eventually found a couple seats left.

There is nothing to write home about this lounge, the F&B are pretty basic, and restrooms are located within the lounge (although half of the toilets, sinks and soap dispensers are out of order). Additional (public) restrooms are located right outside the lounge. The Aspire lounge also has showers, although I cannot comment on those.

The good thing about this lounge is that there are nice views on the apron, between the D and E pier, and at that time of the day (around 11 am), one may think to be in a US airport given the amount of Delta Airlines aircrafts there !


View from the Aspire lounge. More DL aircrafts than KLM at this time of day!


Aspire lounge AMS


Buffet



By noon, the lounge started to be more quiet as half of the visitors were gone. This was also around that time that the AC flight from Toronto landed and it was time for a quick snack at lunch time :-)


Snacks since the flight is late :-)

By 13:00 we left the lounge to head toward the departure gate, located at the G pier, a good 10 min walk away… Boarding was about to start a few minutes later, with all families with children first (and there were quite a few in the Christmas season) and then zone 1 passengers (priority boarding was strictly enforced).




C-GHQQ 787-800 dreamliner at the gate