As a non-Canadian, I was not born with any negative feelings for AC. I have had a fair amount of experience flying to Canada, however, as I am on the board of a couple of Canadian companies and my wife is Canadian (and we own a vacation house there and may buy a second). I try to avoid AC where possible as I find that the customer service is bureaucratic -- people sometimes seem to go out of their way to avoid trying to help. This is different from AA or Jetblue or CO, where gate agents and flight attendants actually try to help. AC is better than US and UA (although I've seen a little improvement in UA recently).

When I fly BOS-YYC, I have had better experiences on AA than on AC. In particular, I was taking my 8 year old daughter with me to Calgary for a board meeting scheduled to coincide with the Calgary Stampede. Due to thunderstorms, the AA flight from BOS-ORD was delayed and we missed our connection to Calgary. The very helpful person in the Admiral's Club told us that she could get us to Calgary via DFW or we could take the direct AC flight, but not in first class. We chose AC. While we were listening, she called AC and arranged for the seats. At my request, she specifically asked for seat assignments and gave me specific seat assignments (e.g., "You have seats 14B and C"). She then gave us vouchers to eat at any restuarant in the airport up to $20 per person (or something like that as this was a few years ago) and I took my daughter to Wolfgang Puck, which she loved. Then we walked over to some kind of AC desk (I believe a transfer desk, though I can't really recall). There, the AC person proceeded to tell me that we didn't have seats assigned (she may have even told me at first that we didn't have reservations). I recounted to her the conversation that I'd heard half of and she basically told me that I was lying. We repeated this a couple of times without success and in part because she was exceedlingly rude, I asked to speak to her supervisor. Interestingly, he was at the next desk over. I started to explain what he'd clearly overheard and he said, "Yes, I was the one who took the call from the Admiral's Club." I asked if he had told the Admiral's Club person that we had been assigned seats 14 B and C and he said "Yes." But, later he decided that he couldn't or didn't want to assign those seats for some reason that now escapes me (in part because it didn't make sense to me then). So, he took the seat assignments out of the system. That was hard to comprehend but what was inexcusable was letting his employee have a conversation with me and accuse me of lying about what had happened when he was standing 5 feet away and knew what she was saying was false. Then, he refused to assign us seats together at that point and told us that we would probably get them if we waited. When I expressed my unhappiness about the prospects that my shy 8 year old would be sitting separately, he said rather brusquely, "My kids all sit unaccompanied and it is not a problem for them." We ultimately did get seats together.

While I can't speak that highly of most US carriers either, especially relative to some (but not all) of the international carriers that I fly, I think the attitude of some of the AC staff really still feels like a throwback from the days when it was a monopoly. And, rather than let AA/Onyx buy CP a few years back, the Canadian government clearly preferred a Canadian monopoly to having a real competitor to AC (if that competitor had significant US ownership). My impression incidentally was that CP had much better customer service than AC, though I didn't take too many CP flights.

I have had positive experiences with AC employees and good flights. I did not start with any inborn anti-AC sentiment, but have found that AC is usually an unattractive option for me when flying to Canada. Good customer service could probably have gained a loyal customer and gained 2 to 8 trips a year. I don't think it is fair to assign all the feelings people have about AC to inborn Canadian AC-bashing or even just, as one of the other posters has done, to people who are whiners. As someone who, like many of the FT'ers, flies on lots of airlines, I get better customer service at some airlines than others. The culture of AC seems to cause many of the employees to treat customer requests as problems to be handled, often by pushing them back on the customer or by jumping like a bureaucrat to rules, rather than trying to solve the problem in a way that works for the airline and the customer. It strikes me that this is a management problem and not easy to fix, and to regular AC flyers may seem like white noise because it is always there, but as a periodic but not that frequent AC flyer (and a student of management), I see a problem. Given the quasi-monopoly AC has on a bunch of routes, maybe this is a sensible business practice, but it certainly deters people like me who have a choice from flying AC.