Region of Waterloo International Airport - YKF

[danbrotherston]

Yeah, AC does consider it a leg of their flight, but the benefits pretty much end there. There is no through connection of baggage, no through connection of security, no through connection of ticketing. Nothing.

There is zero reason that the bus should go to the airport. Yes, YKF is more convenient than Pearson, but it is less convenient than virtually every other location within the region of Waterloo. It's inaccessible by further transit, it's relatively expensive to park at, it's relatively remote and not that well connected to the road network. It's on the wrong side of the river.

Less convenient: I dunno, man, I get mad every time I have to go to the Boardwalk, but maybe that's for other reasons. The taxi to YKF cost me $30 last time, which is a lot less than the taxi to YYZ. And, as SammyOES points out, it's a much smaller ask to get a ride to YKF than to YYZ. 

The revealed preference is that I will, in fact, take the YKF bus when I'm not on a tight schedule. The protection from misconnects is actually reasonably important in a world where the 401 may occasionally and randomly be broken. 

I don't care about baggage and security. Indeed, I know for a fact that you can be extremely late with baggage at YKF and they will frown at you but print out your baggage tags anyway. Then, because I fly often and I have NEXUS, I don't really have to wait for baggage and security at YYZ. I don't know what you mean by through connection of ticketing. You can definitely get boarding passes at YKF, though you can also just have them on your phone.

There would also need to be a location in the city which AC would need to rent. Seems more expensive than an airport, which they very much know how to rent, and comes handy with a baggage scale and computers talking to the right networks.

There were no taxis at YKF when we arrived last time (possibly that was not typical, I don't know). I'd also have to call a taxi from the boardwalk, except no I wouldn't, because there are buses.

But leaving aside buses and taxis, the boardwalk is simpler closer to most places in the city than YKF even for driving and getting picked up or booking a taxi.

So yeah, the boardwalk wouldn't be my favourite place to get dropped, but it would still be better than the airport.

I am not arguing that there is not value provided by the service. Yes, not risking a missed connection is the biggest one by far. I'm always paranoid about missing my flights. But that isn't really that big a deal, the connections at least with my flights were not tight, we waited more than 2 hours even after spending more than an hour to pickup our baggage.

But I do care about baggage and I don't have NEXUS. This is what I said before. If they managed the connection through YKF, check my bags there, check me through security there, then drop me past security at YYZ and handle my bags for me, then there would be a lot of value to going to YKF. But they don't. They don't leverage any of the equipment at YYZ other than the curb outside the terminal building (and apparently the baggage tag printer which they didn't use when I was there).

As for boarding passes, that's not relevant at all. I get my boarding pass on my phone at my house the day before my flight.