In May and June 2023, we travelled from east to west across Canada. From Halifax in Nova Scotia to Montreal in Quebec, to Toronto in Ontario, to Vancouver and Whistler in British Columbia. Along the way some night trains and commuter trains, the Niagara Falls and – imagine this – a bus journey. A true Trans-Canada Train Trek.
After arriving into Montreal on the Lufthansa A350, we headed out to immigration. Luckily Canada has implemented a new system where bags are transferred to their final destination at some Canadian airports when flying in from abroad.
This saves a lot of time compared to the old system where you had to get your bags, pass through customs and check-in again. Halifax was one of the airports in this system thus we could clear transfer immigration, a much shorter and faster experience than normal immigration. After clearing the immigration processes we had to walk through all sorts of what felt like behind the scenes corridors around the entire airport before arriving in the domestic departure area.
Normally we had a 2-hour layover here, but when we arrived in the domestic departure area we already saw that our flight to Halifax was delayed by 1 hour and 30 minutes. This was a real bummer as we were all quite exhausted at this point. But as there was nothing else we could do, we waited.
The domestic side of the airport is much busier and more cramped than the international part. Most of the domestic area still is the original 1960’s terminal building, built for much smaller aircraft and less flights. Thus it was not the nicest place to wait for a now 4-hour layover, also most shops and restaurants started closing quite early so we just grabbed a drink and a snack from the news agent’s that was still opened.
The reason for our delay was presumably a shortage of planes as the inbound flight of our aircraft was operating perfectly on schedule, but only left Toronto at the time our flight should have left Montreal. In my opinion this means that normally a different plane should have operated our flight but was not available.
By the time our plane finally arrived it was already dark outside. And even though everyone was anxiously awaiting to board, deplaning took ages and boarding wasn’t much smoother either.
Flight AC670
From Montreal (YUL) 21:30 (23:39) to Halifax (YHZ) 00:01+1 (01:48+1)
Flight Time 1 hours and 9 minutes
Airbus A220-300 C-GVDQ
Delivered to Air Canada in December 2021
Finally we were able to board the Airbus A220-300, it is one of my favourite narrow body planes currently out there. It has a sleek modern design and I particularly like the 2-3 seating layout if I can snatch a two-seater.
Air Canada provided individual screens at each seat and had some comfortable but slightly cramped leather seats in economy. Especially leg-room is really tight as my knees where pressed against the seat in font. Now for this short one and a half hour hop this was ok, but I can’t imagine flying 4 to 5 hour flights in this seat. The individual screens with a big offer on entertainment is something we don’t see in Europe, but which I thought was a nice touch.
Take-off provided us with some beautiful night-time views over Montreal. During the flight we were served a salted pretzel snack with a drink, sufficient for the length and time of this flight.
After the long travel day we were happy to see the signs of Halifax airport and finally arriving at our destination. The wait for the baggage was fairly short and thanks to arranging a transfer in advance we were swiftly on our way to our hotel, the Westin Nova Scotian of which we will tell you more in a few episodes…
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