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| - after living in toronto for over a year, continuously getting totally screwed by pearson airport, i was SO excited when porter air, the carrier at the TCCA, announced service to NYC. i booked a flight immediately and i can honestly say it was the best experience i've had flying in canada.
here's how it works: you drag your bags down to union station and walk over to the royal york hotel, where a shuttle picks you up and drives you about five minutes to bathurst st. you shuffle through the first terminal and load onto a big boat, which takes another 5ish minutes to the island. check in is a breeze-- it's very small but the people are friendly. the security checkpoint is incredible-- very quick and pleasant.
the lounge is the trademark of porter air-- they have a kitchen stocked with coffee, soda, and snacks (but no real food) and a bunch of computers. wifi is free, but if you don't have a laptop you can use one of these. unfortunately, they blocked pretty much every website including gmail so there's not much you can actually do (for some reason, facebook is one of the few sites not blocked).
the reason i left off a star is because you have to remember what a small airport this is. the day i was flying, there was a bit of fog (no rain) but it was causing catastrophic delays and cancellations. the plus is that they will actually shuttle you to pearson and load you on a plane there, but in the meantime i had to wait about 5 hours for my delayed flight to finally get in. the one that came in before mine "missed the runway"-- pretty scary considering we're on an island-- but it managed to land in pearson and they did shuttle people over. my flight landed on the TCCA runway (finally! i was starving) and took off pretty quickly after that. even though the flight was short, they served jet blue-style snacks like animal crackers and terra chips.
the TCCA isn't perfect, but it's a huge breath of fresh air compared to pearson. i don't think i could ever fly air canada again.
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