File this under interesting but hard to take advantage of right now. Air Canada has announced that they’ll be opening up their Jetz fleet for all business class flights over the holidays.
If you’re not familiar with Jetz – which, admittedly, I wasn’t – it’s a set of four Airbus A319 aircraft which are usually used for charter flights by sports teams, VIPs, etc.
As you might expect by their normal clientele, Jetz planes are kitted out with all business class seats. The layout includes some sets of four seats facing each other with a table in the middle which is great if you’d be traveling as a group or family. Each seat has 42-49″ of pitch which is comfortable, but you’re not going to be laying flat on the flight.
In addition to the business class seating, taking a flight on one of these Jetz planes will include upgraded meal service and a more rapid experience when both boarding and deplaning because flyers only have to board 35 minutes before departure. Prior to that, you’ll have access to Maple Leaf and Star Alliance lounges.
Seeing as Jetz only has four aircraft, these non-stop flights will only be available on certain routes:
- Toronto to: Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Fort Myers, Barbados, Cancun, Kelowna and Vancouver.
- Vancouver to: Phoenix, Palm Springs and Puerto Vallarta.
- Montreal to: Fort Lauderdale and Barbados.
Flights can be booked for travel from December 12, 2020 to January 6, 2021, but they’re planning on putting together a schedule for March too. When taking a quick look at pricing for these flights, a one-way ticket from Vancouver to Palm Springs on December 19 comes to 599 CAD (~456 USD) . Note that Air Canada flies regular A319s on this route too, so you’d want to choose the flight which only has business class availability in order to fly on a Jetz aircraft.
That 599 CAD pricing for an all business class plane seems pretty solid though considering how much they’re normally charging on that route.
Here’s the seating chart for that flight. This makes it look like rows 11 and 12 might be the ones with four seats facing each other with the table in the middle, although it could simply be that those seats have already been booked.
Assuming that the photo below displayed on Air Canada’s website for this flight is indeed of a Jetz aircraft’s interior, while it would certainly be a comfortable way to fly, it doesn’t scream glitz and glamor in the way I was originally imagining it would look.
The biggest issue for taking advantage of these Jetz flights is that the US-Canada border is closed for non-essential travel right now and will continue to be until at least November 21, 2020. That date has been getting extended by a month each month, so there’s a good chance that the restrictions will be continued through next year, making it much harder to actually fly on one of these routes. The routes are all between Canada and warm/tropical destinations, so it would seem these flights are being intended for vacation-goers rather than essential travelers.
You can read Air Canada’s full press release here for more details about these flights, while you can book a Jetz flight here.
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[…] again, Air Canada is offering its Jetz fleet of all business class planes on select routes this winter. The planes are normally used for flying sports teams but they’ll fly Canadians from the […]
Quote from article: “ Flights can be booked for travel from December 12, 2020 to January 6, 2020,“ WOW, these are the first time traveling flights offered to us regular folks. To think I can begin my round trip at the end of this year and then on the return flight end up back in January 20 before the pandemic started for most of the world! You’re about to enter the twilight zone.
Sorry, just having a little fun with something that will get fixed and then no one will know what in the world I jest about.
In other words, please correct the article to Jan 6, 2021
Fixed. Thanks
Looking forward to the new aeroplan intro next month, but until I get a better feeling about their cancellation policies then I’ll probably hold off booking anything
My sister-in-law and family living in Vancouver just had their Christmas-time flights to Chicago cancelled, despite the border not being closed at that time yet. So whether the border opens or not, if I knew someone who wanted to take advantage of this I would say jump over the US and just go to Mexico or the Caribbean.