Air Canada

I just found out about the new Aeroplan Be a Miles Millionaire contest which runs from now until June 20th. The grand prize is 1 Million Aeroplan miles and there are 160 prizes of 25,000 miles.

This contest runs from today until June 20th, 2008. To enter you just need to collect Aeroplan miles from selected companies- each mile earned gives you one contest entry. Qualifying miles are any  Aeroplan Miles earned through Home Hardware, Esso, Tropicana-Quaker, Uniprix, Rogers Magazine Service, Primus Canada, Bose and Aeromove.

Usually I don’t enter contests, but the chance of winning a million miles will probably sway me to give it a shot. What I like about this contest is that there is a variety of retailers to choose from.

See full contest info here.

According to an article on yahoo  Air Canada has just added new fuel charges on all of their flights- effective immediately.

The new surcharges are $40 return for flights of less than 480 kilometres, $80 return on flights between 480 kilometres and 1,600 kilometres and $120 for longer flights.

It’s nice to see that Air Canada feels that they can do this without any warning at all. For a $25 additional fee for the second bag they gave 2 months warning but for a minimum $40 increase we get none. Thanks Air Canada.

According to the article  West Jet does not have any extra fuel charges- but they are considering them. I hope that if West Jet decides to do this it will not be out of the blue.

As seen in the National Post- Air Canada is introducing a $25 fee for checking a second bag on all flights within Canada and the United States starting on July 15th. The reason given for this is the increase in fuel charges. Usually I would tend to blame the airlines, but with oil prices increasing the way they have been I can see their point… Read the article here.

The annoying thing is that not only does it cost more to fill up my car- but now it costs more to fly too… Of course, not everybody is suffering.

Having recently come back from a trip to Dubai- I think that I have just had the experience of two airlines at the opposite end of the spectrum of airline experiences. One of them was one of the best experiences I have had and one was one of the worst. The airlines in question are Air Canada and Emirates.

Lets do a head-to-head comparison

Pre-flight

Check-in

• Air Canada has a very efficient self check-in process and bag drop off at Dorval airport.

• Emirates: self check-in did not work so had to wait in line

Advantage: Air Canada

Gate

• Air Canada does not make you enter the gate area prior to boarding (which is quite small).

• Emirates does make you enter the gate area, however, it is a huge area with enough capacity for double the number of passengers.

Advantage: Neither

Aircraft

• Air Canada: Aging Boeing 767

• Emirates: New Boeing 777

In-flight

Entertainment
Movies

• Air Canada transatlantic flights have one choice- you can watch the movie on the screens the middle. Or not.
• Emirates- Selection of several hundred movies on your own personal entertainment screen.

Advantage: Emirates

Music

• Air Canada- 8 channels to choose from.
• Emirates- Selection of several hundred music and video channels from your own personal entertainment screen.

Games

• Air Canada- none
• Emirates- Selection of 20 games from the personal entertainment screen.

Advantage: Emirates

Internet Access onboard

• Air Canada- none
• Emirates- available for a fee

Advantage: Emirates

Food

• Air Canada- 2 choices- beef or chicken
• Emirates- also 2 choices, but the quality of the food is significantly better

Advantage: Emirates

The Emirates experience contrasted so much with the Air Canada experience that it mades me ashamed that Air Canada is my national carrier. I was discussing this recently with a good friend of mine who said that he will only fly British Airways to and from Europe, because he is equally disgusted with Air Canada. 

Air Canada really needs to update their long haul aircraft. If I have a long flight to take, they will not be on my list of chosen airlines.

Now Air Canada has introduced a mobile boarding pass. What a great idea! 

They already had Mobile Check-In which allows you to log into mobile.aircanada.com on your wap enabled phone (which I haven’t actually used). Now, for certain flights, Air Canada will send you two sets of SMS messages to your phone.

The first message confirms your flight, the second sends a barcode which can be scanned, thereby eliminating the need for a paper boarding pass.

I was just thinking the other day that it is strange to arrive at an airport with all of your flight info- yet still had to print out a boarding pass just to get from the entrance of the airport onto the actual plane.

A couple of years ago I started keeping my flight information on my phone (without printing anything) until one day I had a hard time at Heathrow for not having any physical documentation regarding my flight. That was the point that I started printing out all of my flight details…. but now I may try to eliminate these printouts again.

All of the details of the new Mobile Boarding pass can be found on Air Canada’s website here

I am planning for my usual trip to Washington in February and on the e-ticket that was sent to me I got invited to contribute to the Air Canada Carbon Offset Program.

If you take a trip and contribute to this program, then Air Canada will use your donation, and also make a matching donation to Zerofootprint. 

For those who are taking flights and also want to be environmentally conscious, I think this is a good start.