By Ekaterina Giannikos
The holiday season is the time to travel for most people.
Many people look forward to going on vacation over the holiday season. While, other people like Stefani Gervais, a flight attendant, do a lot of travelling over the holiday season with very minimal days off. Gervais said she’ll work from the 24th to 31st of December.
According to Gervais, during the holidays since she works a lot she won’t be able to stay in any of the places she travels too. “I’ll be working most of the days but I won’t stay anywhere,” she said.
Pearson International Airport has a lot of people coming into the airport during the holiday season. Robin Smith, Senior Advisor, Communications from Pearson International Airport, said that there were 2.7 million passengers from December to January of 2017.
“In December there are nearly three million passengers that come through the airport,” Smith said.
On a daily basis, Pearson International Airport has a huge number of suitcases arriving and departing. “Our baggage system processes over 100,000 suitcases from departing to arriving passengers,” Smith said.
Pearson International Airport has many flights that go to multiple destinations. “Toronto Pearson had 185 direct destinations served by airlines, 34 in Canada and 151 globally,” said Smith.
“A lot of people are wanting to go the Caribbean islands like Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Jamaica, ” said Sarah Kapetaneas, a travel agent from Flight Centre.
According to Kapetaneas, she gets “the odd person wanting something different so maybe Costa Rica or a more exotic island.”
Kapetaneas says there is a bunch of people that book flights over the holiday season starting from November. “Starting from the beginning of November, we see a huge influx of holiday bookings, so while I can’t give a number, it’s a lot,” said Kapetaneas.
The kind of flights that Gervais does are called turnaround flights which involve arriving and returning from the destination the same day.
“We fly somewhere down south (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, etc) or in Canada (Calgary, Vancouver etc) and come back,” said Gervais.
When flight attendants do turnarounds they still need to be prepared and bring a suitcase with them as anything can happen. “We still bring a change of clothing and a bathing suit because you never know when a mechanical problem with the plane can happen and we might have to spend the night,” said Gervais.
According to Gervais, from the months of November to April she flies mostly down South, but sometimes does European flights. “We mostly do south flights but we still have a few European destinations,” Gervais said.
Who’s coming to Toronto for the holidays?
By Madi Wong
Watch: Ryerson students’ commutes during the holidays
Ryerson students discuss how their commute is affected during the holiday season.
Speak Visually. Create an infographic with Visme
Leave a Reply