Pearson Airport to Ontario's Boarding Schools

The transfer a parent overseas actually needs

A boarding-school transfer is not an airport transfer with a smaller passenger. It is a named, licensed, vetted chauffeur who is the adult the airline's unaccompanied-minor escort hands the child to inside the arrivals hall — with a name board and identification, on a form the parents filled in from the chauffeur's details we sent the day before — and who does not leave until the boarding house staff have taken the child in at the door. It is a text to the parents in Hong Kong, Lagos or Mexico City at the handover and another at the house. And it is a fixed fare, booked and paid from overseas in any currency through the reservation engine, with the flight tracked so a delay or a diversion moves the pickup rather than costing the car. Meet and greet inside the hall is the paid add-on that makes all of this work, and for a child travelling alone it is the service; curbside pickup at the pre-arranged area is included for a boarder travelling with a parent.

The boarding calendar

Every page on this hub follows the same year: the September arrival, Thanksgiving, the closed weekends when the houses empty and the guardian takes over, the December departure and the January return — the hardest trip of the year, into the province's worst weather — the March break, Easter and the June departure with a year's belongings and the trunk. A family's profile holds the boarding house, the guardian's home and the airport, and any leg between them is a fixed fare from the same confirmation; the schools' own sign-out rules — a boarder is released to a chauffeur against the parents' written authorisation, which the school holds — are the rules we work inside. The family and accessible page explains the unaccompanied-minor procedure in full; the pickup page explains the meeting points; the departures page explains the earlier check-in cut-offs an airline sets for a minor.

Schools not yet on a page

Pickering College in Newmarket, Albert College in Belleville, Rosseau Lake College in Muskoka, St. John's-Kilmarnock in Breslau, the Bishop Strachan School and Crescent School in Toronto, and every other CAIS boarding school in Ontario are fixed-fare addresses in the engine today, with the same unaccompanied-minor procedure; these pages are guides, not a limit on where we go.