First off, I have to apologize for the extended delay in getting back to action on here. I've been pretty sick ever since I got back, which took a lot of the excitement out of it, and I was then planning on waiting until I was all better before getting into the blog work, but that hasn't happened either. I decided today that I couldn't really wait any longer, but I'm not going to commit to getting back on my regular everyday posting schedule just yet.
This picture makes it look like I was headed for the JAL first class line. That would be pretty cool, but I was traveling on a far cheaper ticket: Air France business class, which often offers quite good deals out of Vancouver. This year's ticket was just over $2500, not the cheapest business class ticket I've ever seen but still a real bargain when you consider that people will often pay around the same amount for a one-way ticket.
Before heading through security, I had a bit of time to check out some of the nice features YVR has outside security, including the observation area upstairs (sadly without any planes in sight -- it's too bad this looks out over the sleepy domestic terminal instead of the much more interesting international one) and the impressive artwork on display. Apparently I should have gotten my Tim Hortons fix while I was at it -- I had decided to wait until after security, but apparently the international concourse at YVR doesn't have a Tim's any longer. (What sort of Canadian airport doesn't have Tim Hortons??)
Post-security, you used to end up in a sort of mall area, but that's been mostly replaced by a giant forced-walk-through duty-free store, which I always hate. This place does actually look pretty nice, I will admit.
Leaving the duty free shop, you get to the central mall area, home to a big water feature with plants, art, and at the far end...
The famous giant fish tank, always a favorite attraction for me!
Of course, the real star of the show is the aircraft outside the windows. Seatac has picked up a decent variety of airlines in recent years, but YVR definitely has us beat when it comes to Asian airlines (and the current geopolitical situation means that's unlikely to change anytime soon).
The far end of the concourse is new since the last time I was here (summer 2015, so nearly 10 years ago). It was clearly designed to look very similar to the original concourse, but there is one cool new feature -- an outdoors-ish courtyard housed in a big glass cylinder. Sadly, this was closed on my visit -- maybe because of the snow, but I've also heard rumors that it's simply never open.
This whole area is only a few years old, but you can hardly tell. I'm glad they kept things like the pick-up-sticks light fixtures and suspended arrivals walkway, but less excited about the teal carpeting.
This was supposed to be my gate, but this is definitely not my plane! Air India is an airline I have zero interest in flying, especially on a worn-out older plane like this one.
Having walked the entire length of the part of the airport open to me, it was time to try out the lounge. I was excited that there was a proper SkyTeam lounge here instead of just a generic contract lounge, but unfortunately this lounge still allows Priority Pass (and seemingly every other lounge pass product in existence), meaning it was absolutely jam packed. They had a sign out saying they were only allowing people using SkyTeam status or business class tickets to enter, but I was on the elevator up (after waiting for the line to die down a bit) with people who were able to talk their way in with Priority Pass, so I guess they weren't really enforcing that. Most of my problems were probably just due to the crowding, but this is the worst lounge I've been in so far, with a mediocre food selection (unless you wanted to wait in line for hot food, but I always just want snacks when I'm waiting for a flight, and what they had in that category was not good), a bad atmosphere (both due to the crowds and the fact that it's just open to the rest of the terminal below, like the Turkish lounge from last year which I also didn't much like), bad restrooms, and basically useless wifi. Apart from the presence of free food, everything else was better in the main portion of the terminal, so that's where I went after barely half an hour.
Anyway, by this point, our plane had turned up, being bracketed by Air New Zealand and Cathay Pacific, the former of which I really would love to fly on some day. It's a brand-new (roughly one year old) A350, and I had perhaps the best seat on the plane, so I was pretty excited to get going!
Though while waiting for boarding, I spotted this Lufthansa A340 that had shown up. I'd love to get a flight on an A340, but while I could have taken Lufthansa for this trip, it would have been several hundred dollars extra for an objectively worse product... and would have meant missing a different rare aircraft that we'll see at the end of this trip. Air India was just now pushing back, seriously late -- good thing YVR has plenty of extra gates for Air France to swap over to, unlike Seatac where they probably would have been stuck sitting around.
The good thing about the gate swap is that we ended up at one of the few gates with glass jetbridges! And they had both bridges connected, so I was able to board using the business class one, something I've been weirdly obsessed with for a long time and surprisingly didn't get to do last year.
It would have made much more sense for me to board through door 2 since I was in seat 10L, the bulkhead seat behind that door. Originally I was in 1L, but decided to swap at check-in (row 10 was blocked until then) because it provides slightly more space (due to the lack of an extra cabinet at row 1) and it supposedly gets meal service first, whereas row 1 is supposedly the last to get served. The bulkhead seats on this new A350 configuration have an absurd amount of space (except the middle seats in row 10 which are standard), with an absolutely massive footrest where the seat in front would normally go. I love how much the IFE screen setup looks like a CRT enclosure -- it makes me imagine what it would have been like if airlines tried personal entertainment in the CRT era. (Many modern business class seats probably have enough space for a CRT somewhere, but business class seats of the 90s were far less generous.)
And of course there's a Louis Vuitton bag in the bin across from me. What else would you expect from French business class? It's probably even a real one!
And they also gave out amenity kits, in a choice of blue or grey. I chose the blue (obviously), which is still pretty grey in my opinion.
And here's the menu for dinner and breakfast. The menu was a thick book, but the vast majority of it was the wine list, which I didn't take pictures of because I just don't care.
One of the best things about flying with a non-American airline: IFE cameras! Air France just has two on their A350, unlike Turkish which had 3, but I really can't complain.
And we're off! These IFE screens are a bit reflective, but much better than the Turkish ones from last year.
My seat had an annoyingly glitchy IFE system. In addition to the tablet remote refusing to talk to it at all, the cameras kept going out (I could see the people across the aisle from me had them working on their screen) and the map kept having to reconnect to the server, a funny thing to see on an airplane. I miss the old static slideshow map screens...
I've been listening to the newer Muse albums a lot over the last few months, and a while back I wondered what would happen to the last song on their newest album, with its rather interesting title, if it was put on an airplane IFE system. Turns out, at least on Air France, absolutely nothing: The title and listing were both left completely uncensored. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, since they love to play the uncensored versions of US pop songs on the radio in Italy -- I guess English-language profanity isn't a problem in Europe.
I then skipped the cheese course and went right to dessert, which was also pretty good but a bit too coffee-y for me.
At this point, it was only like 4 PM so the crew hadn't yet turned off the lights, but I had gotten up at 4 that morning with the goal of getting some sleep on the flight and avoiding jetlag, so it was time to close the door (a bit of a gimmick in my opinion) and put down the bed. I didn't sleep super well despite the massive space and much better pillow than what Turkish gave me, probably because of the time of day and the fact that there were plenty of people moving around and making noise.
There was also a funny incident maybe an hour after I initially went to bed. By then, the cabin was fully dark finally, but I was woken up by loud birdsong playing in the cabin. It sounded like being in a forest on the Olympic Peninsula in spring. I have some increasing mental issues that often leave me feeling like I'm barely holding onto my grasp of reality, especially when I'm partially asleep like this, so my first thought was that I had finally lost it for real. Eventually, I got up to use the restroom and let the flight attendants know what was going on, and as soon as I got back to my seat it stopped, which made me feel even more like I was losing it. It then restarted as soon as they left, then cut out again for good once they came back to look some more. There are only 16 seats in the back business cabin where I was, and I guess one of those 16 people wanted to mess with the rest of us -- no one ever did figure out who it was.
Neither of the breakfast options were appealing to me, so I went with the express service of bread and a croissant, plus a bag of granola (which was supposed to go with the yogurt, but I ate it on its own) and my absolute favorite, apricot jam. The Air France croissant was decent, certainly much better than the terrible croissants that Turkish served me last year but still definitely not up to French standards.
Finally, it was time to get to France, landing shortly before sunrise and heading by the famous Terminal 1 before taxiing out to what was very literally the furthest gate possible from the main terminal. Thanks, Air France.
Anyway, we'll pick things up with CDG itself tomorrow, at least if I have the energy to write another one of these very long posts!
Ha, I'm surprised you don't like the teal carpeting! It kind of reminds me of PDX! At least with how PDX was in 2023 when I was there, it was quite refreshing to walk out of the plane and see some actual colors around, as opposed to what is normally seen in terminals.
ReplyDeleteThe duty free mall setup they have at YVR looks like what YYC had when I was there in 2018. Some of the stuff after the duty free area looks nicer at VYR though. I must admit that I don't remember much at YYC after the mall area, so there probably wasn't much there worth remembering!
While I can't say that I can remember any CRT personal TVs (I have some doubts such a thing ever existed, at least on commercial airliners, due to the weight), there was certainly an era in which LCD personal TVs and CRT aisle TVs certainly mixed in. An infamous example was one of the first examples of interactive PTVs on an airliner, the first/business-class PTVs which were added to Swissair's MD-11s in the late 1990s. Unfortunately, some kind of wiring fault from those PTVs caused a fire on Swissair Flight 111 in 1998 and caused the plane to crash near Nova Scotia with no survivors. Certainly the PTV era got off to a bad start! I don't know if you remember that crash. Heck, Swissair might have gone out of business before you were born, lol. The Wikipedia page for the flight has some photos of Swissair's PTVs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissair_Flight_111
The United A321neo I was on last summer had a pretty advanced flight mapping system on the PTVs (and those were probably about the size of the AF business class ones even in Economy Plus...I think the regular Economy ones are the same!). In addition to the view you showed, it had a virtual cockpit view and something resembling a hybrid map/attitude indicator. Some of the map angles were quite strange as compared to the standard view (which I probably could have pulled up through Wi-Fi on my phone/laptop), but I did like that it gave the names of the local towns being flown over. The standard maps don't do that, they only have the big cities listed.
I can't say I've ever used an airport lounge even when I've had access to one. I just hang out in the terminal looking at planes and checking out whatever else there is to see in the terminal. Maybe my opinion would be different if I was some kind of frequent flier, but given what you described, I don't think I'm missing much!
I don't know, I just don't like lots of carpeting, especially dark colors like this.
DeleteYeah, I'm 99% sure CRTs were never used as personal TVs on airplanes. If they were, they would have had to be absolutely tiny since even first/business class seats back then didn't have tons of extra space like modern ones!
I was alive at the time of the Swissair crash, but too young to talk or probably even walk, so I obviously don't remember it -- I have read all about it, though. I hadn't seen those pictures of the IFE system -- they must be new. I remember flying on KLM planes in the 2010s with that era of PTVs (which weren't even touchscreen!), but they were at least AVOD instead of looping video -- I only flew on looping video planes maybe once or twice, since pretty much all of my long-haul flights in those days were on old planes with (normally CRT) overhead screens. My very first business class flight was on a plane like that -- the main thing I was excited about with the upgrade was getting AVOD instead of just overhead video!
Delta had the same sort of system for the map screen, including those odd extra views. I'm still not a huge fan.
There are 3 things I like about airport lounges: free food (I haven't had to buy expensive airport food on either of these trips since I eat in the lounge), better restrooms (especially the ability to have a shower after a long flight), and a more comfortable and quieter place to sit. This lounge failed on all but the first of those, and it just barely managed to have free snacks I wanted, so I'm definitely not a fan. I tend not to spend much time in the lounge, especially if I'm at an interesting airport, but it can be nice to have somewhere to relax when I'm overly tired (as is the case most of the time when I'm traveling). I'd never pay for lounge access like so many people do, though!