I had my first experience with travel in Canada during their spring break. According to the airport employees I was working with that travel weekend is as busy or busier than the Thanksgiving travel weekend in the US. Let me temper that with the thought of volume. Although it was busy, Calgary airport does no where near the volume of passengers that Chicago’s O’Hare does, especially not on the US Thanksgiving weekend. I have never been caught in a long customs line at YYC (Calgary Airport) but they were running almost 1.5 hour wait time in the line. YYC has a policy that you cannot get in the customs line more than two hours before your flight, and they we keeping a strict eye on that.
They were forming two lines, one for people who arrived more than two hours before their scheduled flight and one for those who arrived with under two hours till their flight. When you get to YYC, the customs line is directly behind the United Airlines counter so I could see how busy it was or was not. When I arrived at 7:30 am there was virtually no line. I got there early to try and stand by on the 12:50 flight to Chicago. I was not scheduled to leave until 3:51 PM the next day but we were going to finish the class early today (excellent attentive students) so I thought I would wing it (no pun intended).
The United staff was excellent (thanks Tim) and informed me that yesterday the customs line was two hours, so I should line up no later than 11 am for my standby flight. The plane had 15 seats available the night before but by the time I got to the counter that morning, they were booked even (all seats sold). I was put first one on the wait list, paid my change fee and went upstairs to give my class.
We finished up just before 11 so I gathered up my gear and walked down to get in line. That is when I saw why Tim said to get there early. The line was all the way out of customs, wrapping behind the United counter and into the concourse shops where all the restaurants are. The customs line easily had about 200 people in it. Even the two hours and before line had about 40 people in it. Now you would think those lines would cause a huge problem, but YYC is very efficient and has a sharp staff directing traffic. The airport has what I would call Wal-Mart Cowboy Greeters (CG’s). They are older, probably retired men and women who walk around the airport in jeans, white long sleeve shirts, red vests and big white cowboy hats. If you have ANY question you need answered, they are very easy to spot and approach. The CG’s were the ones making sure that our long snaking line did not interfere with other passengers in the concourse or the businesses that we were moving in front of.
As I mentioned, there were two entry lines on either side of the entrance to customs. If you were smart enough (planned ahead like I do) to get to the airport with plenty of time you were put in the plus two hours line. You would think you would then be penalized for your efficiency, as late arrivers got into the other longer line that was constantly moving. But the way they worked it was every ten minutes or so, one of the YYC employees would go over to the plus two hours line and pull people out of a that line and allow them to cut into the customs line. So at 11:30am he would call out 1:30pm and before flights. It worked really well and people were very polite and understood the process (although Canadians are very polite to begin with so I don;t know if this would work at JFK).
It got to the point where I was not even to the customs door at it was already 11:30, so they were coming to the long line and pulling people to the front of the line by flight if you had less than 1:20 till you flight. So if you are dong the math, the early planners (plus two hour line) had at least a 40 minute advantage over those who did not plan ahead. I figured that long lines would work to my advantage in getting a standby seat, but as it turns out, luck was not on my side, at least for flight number 1.