We took a short-haul Air Canada flight in business class from Vancouver YVR to Los Angeles LAX and found the experience to be marginally better than we anticipated.

View other posts in this series:

• Trip Introduction: Cruising the Last Frontier
• Review: WestJet 737-800MAX Economy Class LAX-YVR
• Superb Service and Surprisingly Good Food: The Hyatt Regency Vancouver
• Vancouver with Kids: Fun in the Great Outdoors
• Family Dining in Vancouver: The Best of What We Ate
• Review: Celebrity Solstice Alaska Cruise – Part 1 – Booking and Room
• Review: Celebrity Solstice Alaska Cruise – Part 2 – Dining
• Review: Celebrity Solstice Alaska Cruise – Part 3 – Onboard Entertainment
• Review: Celebrity Solstice Alaska Cruise – Part 4 – Ship Features
• Disappointing Wi-Fi on Celebrity Solstice
• PSA: Do Not Waste Money on Celebrity Cruises Drink Packages
• Pro Tip: Celebrity Cruises Gives Free Parking at MGM Resorts
• Icy Strait Point: A Simple Alaskan Port Town
• Skagway: A Small But Enjoyable Port
• A Brief Encounter at Dawes Glacier
• Juneau: Full of Outdoors Experiences
• Ketchikan: Home to Salmon and Lumberjacks
• Review: Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge YVR (Transborder / US Flights)
• Review: Air Canada 737-800MAX Business Class YVR-LAX (this post)

Booking

For our flight home on this trip, we again preferred a nonstop routing just to make things easier. I also wanted the flight to be late enough so that we didn’t need to rush to the airport after our cruise ended. I had a choice between an American Airlines flight and an Air Canada flight. Cash prices hovered around $250-$300/ticket one way for economy on both flights, or I could book business class for 24,000 Air Canada Aeroplan miles per person. I ended up choosing the option using points to help save some cash.

When buying six seats, it ends up feeling a bit expensive spending north of $1,500 on a flight. While a total of 144,000 miles isn’t cheap, it’s also nice to have a more pleasant experience both in the lounge prior to the flight and on the flight itself. This is supposed to be vacation, right?

Earning Air Canada Aeroplan Miles

Air Canada runs a pretty useful program for North American residents. All the major transferrable credit card programs transfer their points over to Aeroplan, making it fairly easy to accrue their points. On top of that, Aeroplan also runs fairly frequent sales to purchase Air Canada miles at a reasonable cost. This all adds up to a program that makes it easy to do business, especially if you need to amass a large number of miles quickly. The following links include a referral that I may earn a commission from.

Some of the better current offers include:

• The Capital One Venture card offers a pretty decent sign-up bonus of 75,000 miles for spending $4,000 in the first three months, plus 2 miles per dollar spent. Points transfer 1:1 to Aeroplan.
• The Chase Sapphire Preferred card offers 60,000 points plus a $300 travel credit for spending $4,000 in the first three months. Points transfer 1:1 to Aeroplan.

Arrival and First Impressions

We left the Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge and headed towards Gate 80, where our flight home was waiting for us. Naturally, there was a small hedge maze for children in the gate area and our kids wanted to check it out before boarding. Not sure why some children decided it was fine to walk on top of the hedge maze, but I guess that’s one way to avoid getting lost. It might be a nice place for kids to release some energy, but it would have been nice if there was a little more here for the kids.

Once onboard the aircraft, we quickly found our seats. Since there were six of us, we took the entire third row and two seats in row four. You’re not going to find lie-flat seats on this route, but the 16-seat cabin still seemed good enough for the quick three-hour flight home.

The Seat

Waiting for us at our seats were some water bottles and headphones.

The seat itself was a bit on the thin side, but it was fine enough for a three-hour flight. If it were a cross-country flight, I might have a different opinion of the seat. There aren’t any real frills at the seat and the controls were primitive, but it was nice to have a footrest available. I definitely made good use of that.

In the center console between the seats, there is a storage compartment where the headphone jack and the power outlet are located.

Dining

After taking off, a flight attendant came by to offer everyone a hot towel. Of course, the kids still don’t know what to do with it and have no interest in it, so now I have two towels. Only one to go.

We each received a small dish of warm nuts along with a drink of choice. I chose a red wine after consuming enough beer in the lounge prior to the flight.

The adult meal on this flight was a chicken pasta, with salad and bread. After the lack of filling options in the lounge before boarding, it was nice to have a real meal here. Those looking for fewer carbs might want to look the other way, but it was one of the better dining options I’ve had within North America not billed as a premium transcontinental flight.

The kids meal (if you order it in advance) is also pasta. But unlike the adult meal, it’s accompanied by a large assortment of fruit. I wish everyone got the fruit. Char also had some apple juice to accompany her boxed apple juice. It’s certainly a filling kids meal that should do a good job at producing a happy child.

Entertainment

I didn’t get a picture of the entertainment options on this flight, but I thought they had a great variety of shows and movies on this flight. I’m simple, so if Dumb & Dumber is an option onboard, I know I’ll have a good time. What was awesome was that the video monitors at each seat felt very new and responsive. The kids also had a decent number of choices to enjoy on the entertainment system, but I always recommend bringing your own entertainment onboard just in case it doesn’t work out.

I didn’t end up trying out the Wi-Fi. There is free messaging onboard, but the paid options can be expensive for what you get. You could purchase a Wi-Fi package in advance to save some money, but I just don’t find it compelling enough. I’d rather just disconnect for a few hours than to spend money just for the privilege to connect to the rest of the world. Hopefully WestJet’s plan to make inflight Wi-Fi available for free will pressure Air Canada into doing the same.

Recommendation: It’s Not Bad

With a decent meal and good entertainment, I liked the flight onboard this Air Canada 737-800MAX. Compared to other options I could have taken on this short journey, I certainly don’t have any regrets and think the experience was probably one of the better options compared to the competition on this route. Yes, flights in Asia on a flight this length would be a far superior experience, so it’s important to keep comparisons relative to what you might otherwise be able to fly on a given route and I think Air Canada comes away looking pretty favorable.

Like with everything, much of the recommendation falls back to the ultimate cost of the trip. Would I be open to paying a huge surcharge over regular economy to take this flight? Certainly not. But with regular economy being so expensive for our dates, paying a comparable rate to be in business class seemed worth it.

Have you flown Air Canada business class on a short haul route? What were your thoughts?