...yyz check in easy as very little line at biz class check in at yyz...they use AC lounge which in the temproary departure area (airport is being upgraded) has all the old furniture from the AC lounge that has now been updated in terminal 1 proper. But booze and soup, crackers salad and munchies were on offer so it was fine. Boarding was a bit of chaos as except for special needs passengers they dont pre-board J, I made the assumption they did went to front of line and had some old italian guy get mad at me. GA said to the guy we were J and we could board when we liked but an announcement would have been nice. Pre take off sparkling was ok....meal was fish and steak, I had the fish it was fine and the starter gnocchi with cherry tomatoes was actually pretty good. Drank a so so Chianti and a quite good white from sicily which i forget the name of. Flight arrived in MXP 1/2 hour early..so we trudged to the lounge. Its pretty lousy, just crakers cookies chips, but espresso was pretty good. Had the ladies at the desk take care of getting us upgraded to J on the flight to cyprus...this was made easy by having Nicolo inserting a note on the file. J on Cyprus air 2 seat x 3 config...food was god awful as was the wine. Touched down in cyprus on sched. Got the rental car and drove to le meridien in Limissol. limissol not so great, kinda low budget tourist destination with only 4 seasons and le meridien on the high end. Resort was very nice as was the brekkie. enjoyed cyprus, found it more middle eastern than like the greek island, but lots of good history and ruins to visit. Spent 5 nights there and enjoyed it alot.
Flight to rome departed on time, had gate agent put us in J and brekkie on flight was better than dinner 5 days previous. In rome is where AZ really shined. My wife and i were planning on flying to MXP then taking the train to Venice. I mentioned this to the gate agent and she said go to the tix office they will change it for you. Well they did, so we went directly to venice!!! Nice one, not only that we were in a J seat (no J service)...and the departure was leaving in 10 minutes and the gate was about 20 ft. from the tix office total layover time in rome about 25 minutes!! Nice one AZ!
Once in venice well its venice..we had a suite at the danielli which opened on to the canal...champers and a birthday cake (it was my 40th) were in the room waiting....great meals...great place and 25C and sunny every day
to get to milan we took the vapretto #82 to the train station...a beautiful 30 min ride...took the first class Eurostar to Milan (60E for 2) ...and stayed at the Westin Palace in Milan (about a 5 min walk from the train station). Bus to MXP took about an hour but that was in rush hour traffic. Check ina t MXP even for biz class was chaos...took about 20 min (not enuf GA's)..so we only had about 5 min of lounge time before walking to the departure gate. Flight had a 45 min delay due to air traffic but we made up the time during the flight..so we arrived on time back at yyz. Security was extra tight due to those assho!es who planned on bombing the stock ecxchange but it only added 5 min...there was just 2 extra document checks. Overall a great trip with AZ really coming through....every segment in J and changing the tix to venice was just great.