Business travel can be fun, if you know some good loopholes
I could've had a miserable day today.
I showed up at the airport and was stunned to see a queue that would probably take an hour to go through - an hour, if I was lucky! It must’ve been at least 100 or 200 metres long.
I had over an hour and a half until flight time, but that felt like cutting things a bit short. I considered my options. You can always skip the line when you have little time left, but it wasn’t time for that. So I instead checked out the ‘no checked luggage’ line. Fortunately that line was very short, with only a few people, and I could in theory take my luggage on as carry-on.
But I really didn’t feel like checking my bag - and I then noticed that there were 6 check-in terminals that were not being used!
To say that I was shocked would be an understatement.
I ducked under the cattle rope line, and nearly took it out with my backpack in the process - oops - and I quickly set myself up at the nearest free terminal. A minute later I had my boarding pass and I was in the next queue - to check in my bag.
While lingering in the zip-zag line of people who had their boarding passes, I was amused to notice that virtually no other people were taking advantage of the unused computer terminals. There was only one Air Canada employee managing the line, providing assistance to people unfamiliar with the touchscreen terminals, and encouraging people to move further along to the aforementioned unused terminals!
One man made a snide joke about my graceless movement that ripped down the cattle herding line making me look like a “boob”, although he acknowledged the wisdom of maximizing the efficiency of the terminals!
It was interesting to see such a massive bottleneck at the first stage of the check-in process. It made me wonder how many other bottlenecks I would have to surmount.
I made a remark about the inefficiency in the first stage of the check-in process to the first Air Canada employee I met with and she lamented the fact that Air Canada has recently laid off employees.
Aha.
It looks like Air Canada introduced self-check-in terminals as an alternative to the check-in counter. Now, the check-in counters are the only option at Pearson Airport’s Terminal 2. Which would be fine if there were enough staff on hand to help people with the self-check-in.
Of course, there’s only one over-worked lady managing dozens of terminals, and an insufficient number of terminals accepting people’s bags once they make their own boarding passes.
Stellar, Air Canada, absolutely stellar.
I proceeded to the US Customs checkpoint. Wait time? Less than a minute.
It was a big relief, and also a slap in the face: the bottleneck at the start of the check-in process leaves the customs checkpoint under supplied with ‘clients’!
The security checkpoint had a small lineup, but nothing that a five minute wait couldn’t solve.
Thanks to the fact that I was shameless or clever enough to skip over the stupid bottleneck by finding my little loophole, I had plenty of time to sit down and chat on the phone and read before getting on my plane.
I wasn’t able to share my wisdom with anyone while I was at Pearson, though - the people waiting in line for a free terminal were so far back it wasn’t possible to say, “hey, just skip the stupid line, there’s plenty of room at the front”.
Perhaps a few people will read this and learn not to trust queues operated by Air Canada.