urgent flights to Toronto Canada

[daft009]

thanks all.

want to keep it simple for my FIL who is 70+ and travelling alone for the funeral.
he can manage 5hrs in Y!

EDIT: Still no Canada ETA, but have booked the ticket! have asked relos if they can get a letter from the hospital etc just incase

 

[MEL_Traveller]

hmm. aeroplan is selling for 87.5k points but only a ~100min transit.
reluctant to buy aeroplan points if it takes ~72hrs for the points to be credited.

using VFF there is nothing on one 1 PNR

yep, will do the ETA next, thanks for the reminder

100 min transfer is fine… it will be protected in the case of a miss connect.

 

[elanshin]

thanks all.

want to keep it simple for my FIL who is 70+ and travelling alone for the funeral.
he can manage 5hrs in Y!

EDIT: Still no Canada ETA, but have booked the ticket! have asked relos if they can get a letter from the hospital etc just incase

Hopefully you'll get your flights sorted soon. Don't forget to potentially look into hotels as well if hes not necessarily looking at staying with the relatives.

 

[daft009]

100 min transfer is fine… it will be protected in the case of a miss connect.

thanks. think i must have rememberd incorrectly, its a ~5hr transit and one PNR so all good now

Hopefully you'll get your flights sorted soon. Don't forget to potentially look into hotels as well if hes not necessarily looking at staying with the relatives.

thanks. yeah he's staying with relos.

now to figure out the flight home!

 

[equus]

now to figure out the flight home!

As you are waiting on a Canada ETA, I assume the FIL is not a Canadian citizen - so you had better get a wriggle on about the return flights as

Visitors not holding return/onward tickets could be refused entry.

(or at least book a refundable onward flight to the US or the like).

 

[daft009]

As you are waiting on a Canada ETA, I assume the FIL is not a Canadian citizen - so you had better get a wriggle on about the return flights as


(or at least book a refundable onward flight to the US or the like).

yeah will book this evening... full cash fare is the only option I found
overall ~$6.7k return in 75% J I am happy with, being last minute and all

 

[daft009]

Got the Canada ETA and return flight booked using $$.

He leaves tomorrow at midday. Brownie points for me, the son in law

 

[kangarooflyer88]

First, condolences for your loss. As a Canadian who often travels between Australia and North America I thought I'd provide some advice:

• If travelling to or transiting via the USA, ensure you have the Mobile Passport Control (MPC) app installed on your phone. With this app, you can clear your customs declaration when you land in the US, and then instead of joining the long queue of foreign passport holders, you join the queue for Mobile Passport Control which often takes mere minutes to clear

• Another US point, if you're connecting onto a flight anywhere from an overseas destination like Australia, you will need to collect your bags, clear customs and re-check the bags

• Congrats on securing a United business class award. They will have access to the Singapore and Air New Zealand lounges. They will also have access to the United Polaris lounge in San Francisco (provided they have adequate connection time). All they need to do is show the lounge agent the boarding pass of their flight to San Francisco in United Polaris and they'll be given access. Oh and the lounge is quite good: they've got showers, sit down dining, a comprehensive buffet and ample room to get things done.

• If you ever run into a situation where you cannot find United Business class award availability using Virgin points, I'd say try checking a couple days before you fly out. So sure, maybe you couldn't find SFO > SYD right now. But who knows maybe 3 days before they are scheduled to come back it pops up. I say this from experience, as this happened to me the last time I flew back from North America

• Aeroplan can be a great program, I've used it multiple times to get back to Canada. One thing to keep in mind with Aeroplan is you can force them to open up business class availability to Sydney (I've done that a couple of times). How you do that is you construct a routing where there is business class award availability along the way. Coming out of Toronto, that would be something like Toronto to Zurich on Swiss then connecting on with Swiss to Istanbul, then grab the Turkish direct flight down to Sydney (for instance). Importantly, with Aeroplan you can add a stopover along the way for 5000 points more. This can be really beneficial if you cannot find award availability in one segment along the way. For instance, flying LA back to Sydney there was no availability. However, there was availability to Seoul on Asiana, and then a couple days later business availability down to Sydney again with Asiana. So I booked a 3 day stopover in Seoul, got to see a new country for peanuts and really enjoyed the Asiana A380 service.

-RooFlyer88