In summary: Flair is a terrible airline, and should be avoided even at significant cost. I believe the kids these days might refer to it as "hot garbage".

The details: I flew Flair yesterday for the first time in quite a while. My one previous experience was a YYC-YVR turn (i.e. I got right back on the same plane an hour later) in 2021, which wasn't great, but acceptable given the $98 all-in price.

I'll preface my comments with the fact that I've flown plenty of (U)LCCs in the past - Swoop and Lynx when they were around, Frontier, Ryanair, JetStar, Jeju Air, Norwegian, etc, so I'm familiar with the LCC nonsense/shenanigans. Also, I don't care whether you want to call them LCC or ULCC, I'm just going to use "LCC" because it's easier.

Even placed in that context, Flair is horrible. They seem to think they're smarter than every other LCC out there in not letting you complete OLCI and get a boarding pass unless you've paid for a carry-on. Other LCCs want to cut costs by making customers self-serve or pay a fee to do it at the airport, but not Flair. I guess they think that they're either going to annoy customers in to paying for a carry-on or they're going to catch a bunch of people with carry-ons that they somehow wouldn't have noticed and charged for at the gate (where they aggressivly size both personal items and carry-ons that weren't tagged at check-in). Either way, it leads to a huge number of people out at the check-in desk - not at all LCC-like.

We all know LCCs can be pedantic about bag size, but no one has ever hassled me about the small backpack I use as a personal item. Until today, when because something was bulging a bit and it wouldn't slide cleanly into the sizer, so I was forced by the Flair agent to play the game of shifting stuff around and getting my jacket out of the bag. Not a big deal, but come on, you should be able to tell from the first 10 seconds of our interaction that I'm not paying your stupid $39 carry-on fee, so you're just wasting both of our time and annoying me. And yes, LCCs like to annoy customers, but as a way of driving revenue, so if I'm not going to pay, you're just pissing me off for no benefit.

Once you've satisfied the Sizer Nazi, they don't print you a boarding pass, they e-mail it. And refuse to print it if you ask. Do they e-mail you a mobile BP? Of course not, they e-mail you a PDF that's meant to be printed out at home, meaning you'll constantly be resizing it or moving it around to get it to scan or show people.

They also refused to give me my BP for the return flight, which they insisted I could only get at YVR. Because they need to keep the overstaffed YVR check-in desk busy, I'm sure. Again, what airline does this? What's the point? They think I'm going to pick up a bigger carry-on there that their staff at the gate for the return flight won't notice and charge me for? The whole thing is asinine. Get to YVR, ask them to print the BP, they refuse, saying it doesn't open until 3 hours before the flight.

(I wrote the above comment about the overstaffed check-in counter at YVR in the morning before having been there, but when I went to fetch the BP for my return in the evening, holy crap did it feel prophetic. I was shocked to find they had 15 or 16 people working the check-in area with only 4 flights going out that night, with a big gap between the first two and the later ones. A real LCC probably would have had fewer than half that number of staff for that few flights.)

I paid extra for the exit row to have more legroom since I'm a tall guy. What I hadn't considered was with the very tight pitch and thin seats, I might have the guy behind me's legs stuck in my back constantly (even though he's not very tall). So much for enhanced comfort.

They played the "in final preparation for landing" announcement on the outbound as we were still climbing out and the seatbelt sign came off. Sure, the FA just selected the wrong announcement on the panel, but it doesn't inspire confidence in their training if they're making basic mistakes like that.

The cabin was too hot in both directions. Not quite Chinese airline hot, but uncomfortable for many people, and of course the puny personal air vents on the 7M8 are useless to cope with that. And it made the nasty BO smell from a couple of literally unwashed passengers nearby even worse.

Other things: they charge a 2.4% fee for taking Visa or MasterCard, and don't take Amex. They encourage you to download their app, but they don't have an Android app. Well, their website has a link to one in the Play store, but it's out of date and can no longer be downloaded, at least by any reasonably current version of Android. This is true of both their regular app (for bookings and such) and their in-flight app (for buy on board, entertainment, etc). Why this crappy little LCC needs two apps, who knows. But given the 1.6* rating on their app in the Apple store, maybe it's a blessing that we Android users don't have to put up with it.

The flight status on their website shows "arrival" time as the runway time, not when it arrived at the gate. So never mind that 12-minute taxi after landing, your flight "arrived" as soon as it hit the runway. In both cases, they managed to turn a small arrival delay on the inbound into a much larger departure delay. That's by no means unique to Flair, of course, but annoying nonetheless - I've definitely flown LCCs that emphasized punctuality as part of their model, and F8 clearly isn't one of those.

Pick your favourite supposedly surly, embittered legacy airline staff, and the Flair ground and cabin personnel were just as unpleasant, as though they had been mistreated by the company for decades.

Overall, stay away. Stay very far away. I have nothing positive to say - at best, things were barely adequate, and a number of them were terrible. Their sizeable expansion in the years since another FTer called them "Canada's shameful, disgraceful, embarrassing new ULCC" in 2018 has done nothing to improve the situation. Pay a sizeable premium to fly AC, WS, UA, DL, AA, whatever. Just don't give money to this garbage airline.