A bike trip that can begin from your own front door is great, but sadly most involve some kind of motorized transport first, usually an air flight. Also sadly, each and every one of our airplane powered trips now has a blog page with some sort of rant about airlines. This blog is no exception, and this is that page!

It turns out that from Victoria or Vancouver most flights to Cancun have crazy multi-stop durations, like 15, 20 or even 30 hours. There are only a very few that will fly non-stop - for about 6 hours, and these leave very early in the morning (making them hard to get to on time from where we live) and land in the evening, making it hard to get away from the airport, in the gathering dark. One and only one airline runs a flight leaving at night (easy to get to) and arriving in the morning (leaving daylight to get somewhere in), and which is also non stop. That airline is (otherwise) the worst in Canada - it's called Flair.

Flair has taken the nickel and dime you to death model that we cried about using Condor to go to Frankfurt, to some levels of refinement  that I would not have dreamed up on my own. They begin with that idea that only the tiniest of "personal" items boards with you free. Any other luggage and you are quickly into a $105 charge. Bicycle? add $82. After that they begin to mop up any spare dimes - like selling insurance against them cancelling or postponing the flight ($42) and actively threatening to split up travelers and put them in centre seats, unless each pays $21 for a standard seat. Do you want a printed boarding pass? That's extra. Need help booking, and phone their "customer service" line? $25. Want to pay for the flight by credit card? $23.84. (Do they expect us to come in somewhere and pay with dollar bills?). The flights also have no (wasteful) food offered, no entertainment, and the jury is out on whether water is free or not.

All this is now kind of standard to us, having flown a bit in the last year, and of course we long ago became accustomed to airlines dreaming up and changing different fares for each day of the calendar. But I admit to having been surprised to see that Flair also changes the prices of some of their add on fees (like seat selection, or in our case, the cost of a carry on) depending on the day, and depending if its going to the holiday spot, or returning, on the very same aircraft. And finally, I have printouts showing them coming to different total costs of passage, on the same day and even with the listed base fares unchanged, depending if I tried their website with Opera (which ultimately failed), Chrome, or by phoning them. It's not so easy to see why/how  totals differ, because the itinerary for the two of us lists 26 lines of individual charges. And oh, before they would help  with that Opera failure, we spent 30 minutes emailing them screenshots to prove it was their site in Opera, and not us,  that had failed, else they would charge that  $25 for having to help.

Here is one version of the various charges. There are only 24 lines here. Later we had to throw in some more bicycle packages,  bringing total charges to 26 and the total cost of going to  Cancun from Vancouver  and returning to $1878.

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MARIEANNE ARATAAnd I thought Spirit Airlines nickeled and dimed us going to Costa Rica! This has that beat!
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5 months ago

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Are you detecting any "the flying part of this trip is not fun" from us here?