Toronto Pearson Airport

Not Verified | Agree with all the other reviews. Very chaotic entry system. Lots of different stages and "holding pens" staff must be highly stressed working there. I arrive here once a year on a visit to family, and the new kiosk entry system has really made things worse. I guess it is either a precaution against terrorists or something to do with preventing cannabis being brought in from elsewhere since the law changed. After a very long walk up and down various steps and escalators you arrive in a customs hall where you are told to find a kiosk with a green light. The explanatory drawing on the machine is not helpful as it refers to an ID card and doesn't tell you you need to put your passport face down. You need to be fairly skilled in inputting into a computer to answer the questionnaire. It takes skill to get your face at the right angle to get your photo taken. Staff try to help but its so busy with confused people, especially those on connecting flights panicking. Its not even clear how to get out of the hall. Staff do their best. They can't indulge in chit chat in such chaos. They must be stressed to hell. They must hate people after working in such conditions. No wonder they don't smile. After another long walk you end up in another hall with those long queues snaking through with barrier tapes. You go through a physical barrier, show your passport and customs receipt, answer more questions, with another long walk through barriers where you show your receipt twice more before you get to the baggage hall. Allow about one hour for all this at quiet times. Do not throw away, lose or screw up the receipt with your face on. You'll never get out otherwise. Before the introduction of this system you used to just join one long queue and clear customs and border control through one exit point. Yes, you queued for ages, but it was simpler. l would describe Toronto Pearson as a modern version of one of Dantes Circles of Hell. I've been through some busy airports like JFK but never experienced such chaos as this. Ditch the kiosks please. Let's have grumpy humans again!

✅ Trip Verified | I have completed two round trips to Toronto for business in the past three months. Both times with AA, flying in and out of terminal 3. Arrivals: (June and Sept 2019. Both Sunday early and mid-day arrivals) Pretty straight forward each time. Talked to CBSA general questions. Asked about tooling for work. No problems. Departures: (two weeks later each time Friday travel late afternoon). Again pretty straight forward. Declared items sent for extra screening questions. Talked to U.S. CBP No problems. Proceeded to terminal gates (T3 A gates). Not many options for food, small and can get crowded. Went upstairs to the premier lounge and it was standing room only. Not a fan of this part of Pearson. Down at the bottom for airport departures due to lack of amenities. No complaints about arrivals or security.

Not Verified | I would give this airport security staff a negative 10-star rating. This airport looks more like a fish market with security constantly shouting at your face at TSA. Although this was my first experience with this team I will make sure that it’s also the last because that’s how bad they were. I am a frequent traveler and I have never seen such unprofessional and arrogant staff. If you want to know what hell looks like then visit Toronto Pearson airport where the staff do not love their job, they hate it and they hate you too.

Not Verified | I googled "Toronto airport awful" to see whether the staff and processes are really as bad as my experience with Pearson has been, and the short answer seems to be yes. The staff can be jaw-droppingly dismissive, rude, and insensitive to travelers. Travelers are pointed to lines without any signage or verbal explanations of what to expect, and the lines can long and slow-moving, with no apparent concern about passengers missing flight connections for no good or even known reason. I was in what apparently is the "immigration rejects" line, though an ordinary tourist simply in transit between a flight in from the U.S. and a separate flight out of Canada. I have a "known traveler" ID in the U.S., and had nothing remotely unusual to declare or explain, but the immigration process (though I was just going from one airport gate to another) took three hours. I saw one woman who apparently took a wrong turn and had discarded her immigration slip being forced to go through immigration again - thereby meaning she would miss her flight connection - beg frantically and repeatedly to be able to talk to a superior instead, but was coldly refused any recourse or consideration, or even a human-to-human dialogue. Forcing the passenger to go through the process again might have been reasonable, but the way the staffer treated the woman was a horrible experience even for standers-by. About an hour later, the guy behind me laughed out loud with gallows humor because about 5 out of 6 of the personnel staffing the processing desks seemed to be having a leisurely huddle together instead. They never even glanced in acknowledgement, much less with reassurance, to all the people they kept waiting that much longer in line.

✅ Trip Verified | Stuck at the gate on Air Canada and cannot deplane because jetway will not move. Absolutely ridiculous. Need to make next flight. After 45 minutes moving to another gate. Will most likely miss connections due to customs and shoddy airport equipment. I will never connect through here again.

✅ Trip Verified | Under manning is rife! On arrival there was a queue to get to a machine which asked lots of questions which would have been easier and faster with a person or online when applying for the visa. Rather confusing and slow after an 8 hour flight. Then you get a voucher and after walking miles you get to a huge holding pen in a vast hall full of people where you queue again for a what seems like an eternity. Eventually there is a real person who asks you why you are there and sends you on your way. In this vast hall full of people somebody was having trouble with a machine and called out "Does anybody actually work here" but there was no answer. So presumably there wasn't! On departure there was a big board saying "Step 1. Check in at a kiosk. Step 2 Proceed to bag drop". Unfortunately it didn't say how you identify a 'kiosk', and I queued at the bag drop thinking I was going to a kiosk. The result was it would not accept my bag because I had not got a label (There was nothing to say you need to get a label) so I had to go back to the label printing machine 'kiosk' and then queue again for the bag drop (for 20 mins). The second time round I had to redirect somebody else who had made the same mistake. The end of the queue was at one end of the line of bag drop machines and there was a crowd of people trying to stick their tags onto their luggage in the middle so the next person in the queue could not see the free machines at the far end so stayed in the queue. The result was the machines were heavily under-utilised and the queue was much slower than it needed to be. In fact they only seemed to be used by the few people who lost patience and jumped out of the queue to use them. The kiosk gives you a luggage tag, but there was no explanation of what to do with all the separate peelable parts of the tag so I had to ask one of the 2 very harassed staff members to do it for me. At security there was a woman member of staff heckling the passengers in the queue that they, the staff could process us much more quickly if we weren't so slow and if we didn't do everything wrong. Well there is not much surprise about that. They have the months or years of training and we don't! Perhaps the training is failing if the staff think this is the way to make things work better! Everywhere in the airport all the food was served on disposable plates with disposable cutlery and drinks were served in disposable cups. Conventional reusable china plates and cups seem to be non-existent. It does not need to be like this. This is not sustainable. What happens to all this waste?

Not Verified | My experience going through customs at Toronto Pearson airport was crazy. Many others complain that the agents were rude but the people I encountered were just plain cruel which was surprising. We arrived three hours before our departing flight and I was traveling with my mom who was in a wheelchair. I escorted her all the way through the airport up to customs. When I tried to go with her through customs an agent began to yell at me stating that if I didn’t share a physical address with my mother I would have to go to the end of the line by myself while she was escorted through the handicap line on her own. This wouldn’t have been such an issue if I hadn’t spent a huge amount of time navigating the airport with my mother in the wheelchair. Additionally, the fact that this agent berated me in public with my wheelchair bound mother right there watching just seemed hateful and hurtful. I missed my flight but my mother made it. As a result she had to wait at the airport in our home town for my flight to get in so I could give her a ride home. I’m not sure what the deal is with this airport or the customs there. I have traveled internationally to almost every continent and have never experienced anything like this in my life. I hope this airport and it’s local municipality work to make the experience for traveler maybe a bit more compassionate if not quicker or easier. Until then, I will avoid this airport and it’s disgruntled employees like the plague.

Not Verified | Returning from a family holiday. My main complaint is the fact that on arrival there was utter chaos with very little staff availability. Still my luggage did not get stuck in the system as it did the last time we were there. Last March we visited Singapore and it might be a good idea if some Pearson executives visited Changi to see what an airport can be like.

✅ Trip Verified | Canada has a well-deserved reputation for being very friendly. As a citizen of the USA (but have moved to Mexico) I am quite accustomed to rude TSA airport security folks. But today's interaction with the group who were running the scanner area at about 6am at Toronto Pearson left me speechless. They berated customers, yelled at folks who I'm pretty sure didn't speak English, and basically made us all feel like idiots because we did not immediately grasp your particular airport's system. We were earlier on the same trip in two different airports and everything was different. We had never been to Toronto before and it might have taken just a few seconds to explain what was expected but they spent the same amount of time trying to belittle us. The place was not crowded (maybe eight people in line) and I don't care if they had a long night or a bad day - we might have had the same problems. I bit my tongue because I didn't want to be further humiliated by a search or be subjected to more abusive questioning by calling them out on their boorish behavior. I know this complaint will go nowhere but if you look online, there seem to be quite a few similar complaints. These few employees don't serve your goals at the airport or the reputation of Canada. Please don't turn into the USA. One of those is enough!

Not Verified | The idea of security demands that you have a "sterile corridor" once you have passed security. Toronto Pearson does not do this. Instead of needing to show my passport once or at most twice as in modern airports, I had to show my passport a total of eight times within one fifty minute period, in one instance to get into a room and another to get our of the same room. The personnel are petty an officious but that is only to be expected. Standing on line is never fun but it is tolerable if you think that you will be treated equitably. Instead, lines were created, opened and closed for no reason, allowing those who had not waited to be routed ahead of those who had. I was told they were "special." That is surprising because some were members of my own party. The USA has transplanted customs to be done at Toronto instead of at people's destination (in this case ATL). That part worked well but came as a surprise since it conservatively added thirty minutes to a 90 minute layover. Probably the worse part was the ground operation for Delta, my connection. We arrived barely in time to get in line only to discover after having stood in line for long minutes, that we had to have our passports "verified" (that sterile corridor thing again). That took another ten minutes of standing in a long and slowly moving line to rectify. Al in all we got on as the door was closing and were treated to a steward whose primary interest was getting off on time. he was "shoveling manure" not dealing with humans. Do not go to Toronto Pearson without at least three hours to play around with the petty bureaucrats and feckless regulations before hand or on layover.