This post is pure rant. Just a warning in case you don't like rants :)
They're bastards, I tell you! Bastards! Or, at least, the people who wrote their online ticketing system are. I've never bought a ticket from aircanada.ca without the site screwing up somehow. Today I booked my flights to Calgary and San Francisco, and it was no exception.
It's a bit complicated, because I'm going from Toronto to Calgary to San Francisco to Toronto, so it's not a simple return flight. But they have an option for that; it's called "multi city." So I do that, put in my itinerary, and start choosing flights. So far so good. Then I realise that I actually wanted to go to San Francisco a day earlier; wow, they even have an option to change it while you're selecting the flight, maybe they don't suck that badly after all, right? Wrong. I tried to change it, and was then redirected to a page saying that that "technical difficulties had been encountered." Lovely. And of course back won't work, because they've used POST without doing a redirect, and saying "yes" to re-POST doesn't work.
Ok, so fine, I start again. I put in the right date the first time this time, and get all the way to the checkout. Now it asks me to sign in with my Aeroplan thingy. I do actually have an Aeroplan account because I fly often enough that it's worth it, so I dig up the number. They ask for a 'PIN'. I think that's odd because I remember having a password, but I enter the number I think it's most likely to be, and lo and behold, that's wrong. Same deal of course; can't go back, have to re-do the whole thing again.
Finally, I get back to the same point. I enter what I think is my password, and it works. So why the hell do you call it a PIN, you braindead idiots?
One might ask why I even fly Air Canada. It's certainly a good question; in this case it turned out to be $200 cheaper than anything else, although when they make it that painful to buy the tickets it might almost be worth the money to fly with somebody else. Fortunately, I don't often have problems with the actual flights; maybe I've just been lucky, but they're typically on time and reasonably nice to me.