Toronto Pearson Airport

Be rewarded for coming late. We arrived as directed 2.5 hours before our international flight. We had our boarding passes printed and carry on luggage. We arrived at 10.30. Our flight was 1.37 on Delta. We stood in line to get thru customs and security for over 2 hours. There was a person (older woman) sending those passengers with flights before noon thru an expedited line while everyone else had to wait (even if your flight was 12.01). I also did not see her checking anyone's boarding passes so many could have lied and just went thru. I heard several people with near noon flights complaining that they would not make it. It was ridiculous and rewarding people for being late in my opinion sucks. I'm diabetic and planned to have a decent lunch before getting on the plane. As it was we got thru security at about the same time our plan was boarding. Plus, everyone was extremely rude that we interacted with. Worst airport I have been to in years.

Transferring from International from FRA to Domestic for YHZ and based on previous reports about lengthy delays with baggage and extended transit times we allowed over 4 hours from our scheduled arrival time of 1640 to a departure at 2055. In practice arrived on time, 10 minute walk to Immigration where we had two people ahead of us in the queue, walk through to baggage hall with bags already on the carousel, no problems with customs. Once landside followed the "Connections" signs which after a short walk led to an Air Canada Rep who was informing passengers what to do with their bags, asked about the chance of an earlier flight to Halifax she directed us to a near-by agent. Swift, genial service and a move onto the 1915 departure. All said within 60 minutes of rubber hitting the bitumen we were in the domestic Maple Leaf Lounge and celebrating our arrival in Canada with a glass of Canadian white. From our experience this airport is sold short.

Toronto Pearson is a huge, beautiful airport. You can tell that they clean it a lot. The staff on the other hand seemed depressed and rude. Sarcastically welcoming you, sighing when you ask them a question. The seating was good. Comfortable seats and a good view of the tarmac. Food was good like always. Tim Hortons really helps get through airport experiences. In all honesty I love flying out of Toronto Pearson but they can do better.

Toronto Pearson Airport. Security clearance between domestic and US destinations - why do we have to go back through security? So I go through security in Chicago and fly to Toronto and then to go to my destination I have to pass through security again (at least another 20 minutes-no line). Nowhere else is this required (Philadelphia, La Guardia, JFK, Chicago).

Pearson itself is a modern, well designed airport and, in terms of infrastructure, could be a great welcoming point for visitors to Canada. However, the experience remains stubbornly below expectations due to poor personnel and generally awful organization. This airport is a perfect case study where HR mismanagement consistently snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. Arrival in the passport area: I normally miss the queues as a Nexus holder (assuming the machines are working, but that's another story), but today travelling with family was processed as a returning Canadian national. Arrival hall utterly chaotic: personnel shouting that all passengers with connecting flights should go to the left hand side. We then find that this disorganized scrum is for all nationalities: for some reason, only Canadians with their final destination as Toronto are directed to the new (very expensive, there go my tax dollars) auto passport processing machines. Luggage delivery not too bad: connection time is now getting tight, however. In Toronto you have to pick up luggage, clear customs, then go to a connections area where you manually heave your luggage onto a new baggage belt. Connections line is surprisingly long (no priority access): this turns out to be because, once you have had your tickets checked, a junior baggage handler keeps stopping the belt, despite many people waiting, as he believes that passengers are not depositing their luggage in exactly the right spot on an "X" marked on the baggage belt. The X's are placed widely apart, so that the "official standard" of capacity on the belt only accepts 50% of the luggage it could otherwise handle. Deal with that, then get up to security (mezzanine floor), now at 35 minutes prior to departure. Use priority lane, but then find that priority is not being enforced, and instead merges / alternates with other passengers. No personnel in place to police: for those of us who do travel extensively, and pay $$$$ every year, priority access is critical. Finally get to aircraft 5 mins before door close: Air Canada personnel comment that the delays / general disorganization are the unavoidable standard for Toronto, but that airport management make no improvements despite their never ending complaints. And this leads to the root of the problem: there are three groups of staff working at Pearson. The actual CBSA (Canada Border and Security Agency) staff looking at passports and manning the formal border are federal employees who, to give credit where it is due, are efficient and professional. However, all the personnel manning cordons / queues are contractors who are hopelessly disorganized. Finally, all the security screeners work for an outsourced company, Garda: it is quite astonishing as to how slowly they work, which leads to a strong suspicion that their work is governed by a unionized time and motion study. It's a sad day when I have to say that I would trade all Canada's security screeners for TSA without hesitation: screening is literally 2-3 times faster at any US airport. One of my favorite stats is that productivity in Quebec, my home province, is only 51% of the US. Go to any Canadian airport and you'll see this country's productivity gap at first hand.

Arrived at YYZ on a delayed flight from Dublin. Many passengers had missed connections (myself included) but didn't know where to queue for information on re-bookings or to recheck baggage. Baggage was delivered to a different carousel than the one passengers were being directed to but it wasn't until after a 40 minute wait that an employee decided to quietly announce the change to a handful of passengers who happened to be within earshot. Signage is almost non-existent for the obscurely situated transit area on the arrivals level, and once there, personnel were rude, inattentive and unresponsive, and no one appeared to care a whit about the passengers' well being, missing luggage, or missed connections. And after another long hot queue I was disgusted by the conduct of one employee in the transit area who was loudly chastising an elderly man because the wheels on his bag were facing the wrong way on the transit carousel. Another employee who was hauling luggage for other passengers came up behind me as I was literally lifting my bag onto the belt. She told me to move myself and my bag out of the way. I refused and completed my baggage transfer. Then it's off to try and find the departures level, again very poor signage, only to discover that the gate marked Gate D isn't really Gate D, it's another Gate D, and the Gate D I want is on another level. The security line up which was ridiculously long and slow moving. I am a Nexus member and even the priority line was slow. Overall it was a terrible experience and bad enough for Canadian residents but absolutely shameful that the visitors on that flight had to experience such a blatant disregard for their welfare, and a lack of welcome and hospitality. What terrible first impressions they must have had of both our country and its residents. I've been through YYZ a number of times and the experience never improves, in fact it is getting worse. After this most recent incident I have vowed to never travel through this airport again even if it costs me 2x to take an alternative route.

We are US citizens and we did not check bags, we only had carry ons. We arrived from Munich en route to the US with two hours to spare before our connecting flight. We were directed (along with hundreds of other people) toward the US Customs area and told by a person in a yellow vest to start with Kiosk # 1, which we did. After processing our boarding passes, the kiosk informed us to go to Step #3 - which we did, bypassing Step #2 (a passport scan and electronic declaration) we later found out. When we told the agent at Step #3 that the machine told us to bypass Step #2, she basically told us that we were lying and told my husband to be quiet and stop interrupting her. She then gave us a customs form to fill out by hand. We completed the form - and then the agent directed us to line #1. Once we reached the agent in line #1, he told us that we were supposed to be in line #2 because our customs forms were filled out by hand rather than electronic. So we went back to the beginning to locate yet another person in a yellow vest who listened to our story and told us to go to Step #2 which involved scanning our passports and making our declaration statements online. After doing this, a printout appeared and we would now be eligible now to stand in line #1 - a line of about 50 people. However, my husband's printout had a big X through it meaning that he had to go through line #2 - a line of about 150 or more people. We were now about 10 minutes from our connecting departure and feeling anxious about making it on time. One of the persons in yellow told us to be patient, that we would be called out by flight # and our processing would be expedited. Eventually we were expedited only to find out that we had to go through the Canadian equivalent of TSA screening - again long lines. We made it through the screening process at the time that our flight was to be leaving the gate only to find that our gate was probably 1/2 a mile away. I am a runner so I literally ran to the gate to see if I could catch the plane before it departed. Fortunately due to an airline delay, we did make it to our connecting flight. However, I am telling everyone I know not to book airline travel through Pearson in Toronto.

Worst Airport for connecting International Flights! Unorganized, creating express lanes for travelers with less then three hour connecting flights would be a novelty. I would advise passengers avoid this Airport at all costs if possible and personally will chose other routes.

A logistical nightmare. First we checked in using the awesome virtual checkin machines. This went great. It was quick and easy to do. Then we had to try and find the place to check our bags. Well that was a different story. We asked the lady who was supervising the check in machines and she just sort of pointed in a random direction and said "over there". Well over there turned out to be an area a quarter of a mile down the corridor which we found more by accident than because the signage was helpful. When we arrived in this area they were filtering people through by their flight times. The area was way too small to hold the number of people who were coming through. There was a lot of yelling and pushing by the staff. They kept announcing the flight times they were taking and when no one was coming to the front the only person who was filtering people through would wander away to yell the info to the end of the line. 90% of the time no one there was waiting for that time. So the line up just kept getting bigger and bigger. They managed to create a bottleneck that was just ridiculous. We waited in this area for over an hour and 20 minutes before they would let us check our bags and go through to customs. We arrived at the airport as instructed 3 hours before flight time. This should have given us enough time to check in, grab breakfast and relax before boarding. Instead we had to rush just to make our plane. I'm still not sure why they were filtering people through this remote area. When we finally got let through we had to walk back to basically where we started, another quarter mile. For anyone with mobility issues this would be cruel. When we got to the next area there was nobody there but there were about 500 hundred of us that got let through at the same time because almost everyone in the holding area was waiting for an 8:45 flight. So again we had a bottleneck that took forever to get through. When we finally finished we barely made the boarding of our flight. We were unable to grab food. Whenever possible I will leave from Billy Bishop airport from now on.

It doesn't matter if you check in on time. Somewhere along the way, the ineptitude at Pearson will guarantee that your experience is stressful, frustrating and a downright joke. My family missed our flight out of Terminal 3 yesterday due to the snaking line of hundreds of people waiting to be processed by US customs. Eventually, we asked the yellow jackets if anything can be done to move people up and was told that they don't do that anymore. She assured us that we'll make our flight even though departure was 40 minutes away. They clearly do not have enough US agents processing the volume of passengers coming through. We did not make our flight but to the credit of the American Airlines counter agents, we were put on today's flight. Today's experience was again so horrible that it sealed it for us. We showed up even earlier today after yesterday's fiasco. The line for non-US passengers was a fraction of yesterdays line and we were thrilled when we got here but get this, there was only one agent who was also taking passengers from the other lines. Granted, there were other agents serving those lines but it was painfully clear that the yellow jackets were uninterested in keeping our line moving. Good luck if you are in the non-US resident line. By the time we made it near the front with hundreds of people behind us at this time, that lone US agent got up and walked away!!! They were short staffed but how could it be this bad? We missed our flight again (of course!) but at least the wait for our next flight gives me time to sit and ponder what an absolute disaster travelling from Pearson has been. It cannot consider itself world class by any stretch. We have travelled all over Asia and even in the cities where English is the second language or barely spoken (Tokyo, Taiwan, Siem Reap, Hanoi), you are not greeted with apathy and rudeness. Staff there are competent, helpful and most importantly, not in short supply. High volume airports in HK and Singapore put Pearson to shame. Deal with the volume, Pearson, if you want to rise to the top. Teach your staff what good customer service means. Don't make the travellers you covet suffer the endless problems at every level. You charge an arm and a leg for use of your facilities. After yesterday and today, I truly feel ripped off.