Now that I’ve gone and come back, some notes for the sake of posterity.
- Banff airporter is great. They will move you to a later shuttle if the flight is delayed. Which leads to …
- Air Canada through Toronto, shall we say, SUCKS. The flight out of Dulles was delayed an hour. The connection at Toronto was delayed over 4 hours. The return flight out of Calgary was delayed 2 hours. I missed my return connection through Toronto, got automatically re-booked to 2 DAYS out. Called and put on hold for an hour and re-booked to the next morning. THAT flight got canceled at 1am. Got re-booked to LaGuardia then Dulles. I don’t think so! Another 2 hours on the phone and re-booked for the same morning 7:30am (it’s 3am now) to Reagan National instead of Dulles. THAT flight was delayed an hour. Why? I have no idea. The plane was there, the crew was there. It was the first flight out of that gate. I’m beginning to think delayed departure is SOP for Air Canada. Since I changed my destination airport, that leads to …
- Having AirTags in your luggage is a grand idea. That is how I knew my skis made it with me to Reagan but not my suitcase. And when the baggage handler decided to take my skis to United (the original connection was on United to Dulles) instead of putting them on the carousel, I convinced the Air Canada counter person to call the main terminal and have them brought back to the carousel. I literally watched my skis on the Apple FindMy app traveling from the gate to the carousel, then from the carousel to the main terminal. The next day, I watched my suitcase take a grand tour of metro DC before showing up at my door.
- Oh, I went skiing, didn’t I? YES, skiing was great. I actually liked Lake Louise better than Sunshine Village. The views, however, were better at Sunshine. That is, when it isn’t cloudy and snowy. When it was, the flat light and white-out was something fierce and I actually got vertigo a little bit at the top.
- The exchange rate was great too. It’s like getting a 26% discount on everything.
- Next time I’d stay closer to down town. The local bus isn’t all that reliable with respect to posted schedules.
I would eventually do Banff again, but only after the bad taste left by Air Canada is gone. Next time, I’m going to try a domestic airline and avoid Toronto at all costs.