I have mixed feelings about this review. Some of the issues were blatantly Porter's fault and other issues were out of their control.
The check-in process was relatively smooth and the staff member wasn't overly friendly but not snarky. When it came close to the boarding time for my flight I was making sure to pay attention to any announcements regrading my l flight, but as the departure time loomed closer I began to worry that I was missing some info and went to the desk to ask.
It turns out that along with myself, about half of my flight proceeded to ask the staff the same question to the staff asking if we had missed the boarding call. Instead of someone making a simple announcement that the flight would be boarding late they continued to answer the same question over and over again as individuals came up.
Once we were finally off the ground (15 min late) we hit a flock of geese just after take-off and had to return to the airport to have the plane checked for damage. This I'm okay with obviously as I don't want the plane I'm in trying to turn into a submarine as we're flying over Lake Ontario.
Once we landed again we were informed that we would have to clear Canadian customs, essentially for circling the airport, because we had a US bound flight. Again, not Porter's fault but just adds to the misery. In the end we were an hour late.
There was no effort by the staff to mitigate this bad situation, which just seemed to get worse every minute. All we got was a half-assed sorry, and not for the fact that we left late in the fist place, but for the whole bird hitting incident.
After hearing so many good things about Porter I was very disappointed with my first experience. I'll probably continue to use Porter, but only to destinations where Westjet doesn't fly.