Throughout this journal of my travels, there will be a continuous theme that is covered. My husband loves planes and loves flying. This means that all holidays that we go on, the flights are planned in meticulous detail. Our holiday to Canada was no exception.
Many years ago we aligned ourselves to British Airways as an airline operator. What do I mean by this? Well, after our first long haul flight back in 2007 to New York, we were seriously bitten by the travel bug. However, we are by no means rich enough to travel wherever we wanted in the world whenever we want so we started a plan of how we could come somewhere closer to being able to travel as much as can.
That plan was two fold – 1 build Avios and 2 spend on a British Airways AMEX to achieve companion vouchers.
Along the way there was a 3rd part that came into which was also obtaining GOLD status with British Airways – a subject for another time.
Our Business Class flights to Canada were paid for by a combination of one of our companion vouchers, an amount of Avios and an amount of cash.
Reward flights – paid for with companion vouchers and/or Avios are not easy to come by. British Airways will only release so many and from what I can see there is no way of knowing when they will be released. My husband subscribes to a particular website, which alerts when seats become available but be warned this is usually during the middle of the night so you have to be prepared to wake up early to get the reward seats.
You also need to be prepared to make some compromises, for this holiday we are flying to and from Toronto even though we are visiting both Vancouver and Toronto. This is due to the fact that we couldn’t get a reward flight from Heathrow to Vancouver. Therefore once we land in Toronto we’ll be taking another flight the next day to Vancouver.
Having managed to secure the reward flights, for flight from London to Toronto we had also booked 1A and 2A in the front cabin of business. Why does this matter? This matters because booking in the front cabin of Business means that you first of the plan when you land and the first passengers from your flight to get through immigration. This can make a big difference when you are travelling on a plane that holds hundreds of passengers.
When we started on Journey in Manchester, upon arrival at the airport my husband received a notification that the aircraft we were flying on from London to Toronto had been changed. Initially there didn’t seem to be any impact to our seat allocation. By the time we dropped off out bags, we had been bumped to 9E and 9F – the guy at the bag drop couldn’t do anything about it and asked us to speak to BA when we arrived in Heathrow.
By the time we arrived at Heathrow our seat had been moved to 16A and 17A!
I know this is first world problems but I really don’t understand why we were moved from our original seat numbers – they still existed on the plane we were moved too! Anyway a bit of a discussion with BA at the BA lounge and we managed to get seats – albeit at opposites sides of the plane from each other in the front cabin.
Here are some pictures from the food on offer in the BA Lounge at the B Gate.
We arrived at here around 2ish so to start off with there was a selection of sandwiches.
Also some scones, cream and jam.
Some hot food options of which I sampled the cheesy pasta and salad, which was fairly decent.
But the star of the show was definitely the afternoon tea, which came out around 3.30. A delicious abundance of savoury pastry goods.
The take off on the flight was turbulent but think that was down to these big boys…
On board the London to Toronto flight this was the Business Class menu:
First up – a firm favourite of mine – Aviation gin with a slim line tonic.
I ordered the roasted cauliflower soup with garlic and herb croutons. This came with a small dish of bulgar and carrot salad, lemon labneh (like sour cream)
The soup was very sweet, blended like baby food and was accompanied with the 3 section bread roll. It was alright but I have had better on other flights.
I ordered the J. Bouchon, Reserva Sauvignon Blanc to go with my meal. The taste of the wine was bordering on a Chardonnay not as citrus as it could have been.
I didn’t have a main course but did treat myself to the Chocolate pudding with chocolate sauce. This had a very light sponge and very rich chocolate sauce. A little less sauce and some cream or vanilla ice cream to accompany would have been a nice addition to the dish.
My husband also ordered the Beef Tataki, pictured below which he enjoyed.
We didn’t get offered anything more before landing so didn’t have opportunity to try anything on the second menu.
Picture as we came into land at Toronto…
Once we had landed Toronto Airport we were through immigration extremely swiftly, JFK and Heathrow could learn a thing or two from the system in place a Toronto.
The baggage reclaim in Terminal 3 was a little nerve wrecking. Bags go round once and then are taken off by airport staff and stored on the floor for retrieval. I kept worrying that if we missed the bags we might not realise that they had been taken off and then someone else might walk off with them. I can see why they do it due to the of the volume of bags coming from the flight which was too much to held on the carousel.
Thankfully our bags arrived in tact albeit with one luggage tag missing.