Originally Posted by Stranger
But yes, if web checkin won't work, then neither will the kiosks.
Yesterday I took my daughter to the airport. flying back to YYZ with her cat. She had to pay the $105 pet tax, so she could not use the kiosks either. But at YYC there are only kiosks left, plus the J checkin. At her insistence, rather than just stay in the J line which was long, I went to talk to one of the agents who get the luggage from folks who checked at the kiosk and tried to ask where to go in these circumstances. The dummy sent me to ... the kiosks. I am not even sure she listened to my question, just gave the canned answer. Back to the J line.
You know, this sounds familiar to something I helped my wife avoid when I went in to help her check in for a trip with our very young daughter at YVR a few weeks back as the Dec rush was beginning:
For whatever same (IMHO) stupid reason, it seems AC likes to make YVR a 'kiosk or J only' check-in airport now too, even on heavy pax travel days.
Anyhow, my wife (AC*A i.e. basic) and daughter were travelling with 2 suitcases and a bassinette to be checked. Off we go to the kiosk to check them in, and after she IDs to the system it promptly asks her to confirm she is travelling with an infant today. (I'm thinking, "that's pretty neat that the system specially handles infant tix"!) ^
She checks the seat assignment and then enters '3' for number of checked items. The system then informs her that she "MUST proceed to the 'Triangle' counters" to pay excess baggage fees. She looks at me, then looks at the loooooooooong Triangle line up (at least 30 ppl I would say) and then the clock (it was T-20 mins to boarding time - very important to be there for pre-boarding when you've got an infant), and then back at me to proclaim her annoyance and concern. However, before she could finish 'proclaiming', I told her to "trust me" and just proceed through to the next 'drop off baggage here' counter knowing that the bassinette is 'free baggage'.
Sure enough, after waiting for one person (versus 30!!!) ahead of us to finish in one of the ~12 drop off desks (versus 3 Triangle desks), the agent says "yup, no problem." and prints the tags and off it all goes.
What a perfect example of AC's IT systems causing more chaos and pax anger for absolutely no good reason. If they designed it to handle infant pax, then sure as heck they could put in a little more effort to not mislead everyone into the way over-sized and under-served 'last resort' line-up for any little wrinkle, specially when they take away all the non-kiosk staff!
