Our upcoming flight to Toronto

I never told you this story. 

Our flight to Toronto tomorrow is with Aeromexico. But (against my better judgement), I had originally booked with Air Canada. I won't make that mistake again.

As you know, we fly quite a lot. An average of 16 different airplanes per year over the past six years. And because we are not beholden to any one airline, we fly on a lot of different airlines and so we get an idea of how we're treated. And that number of flights means that we experience airline problems... delays, schedule changes, mechanical problems, weather problems, lost luggage, etc. 

If you only fly once or twice a year, odds are good your flight will go as planned, and you won't have any problems. 

But when you do encounter a "flight disruption", you'll know how valued a customer you are by how the airline treats you at the time.

Anyhow, in this particular situation, I originally booked the flight back in April. At the time, Air Canada's price was substantially cheaper than any other option. And that was around the beginning of the Iran problem, and fuel prices had risen. I bit the bullet, and booked the Air Canada option.

A couple of months later, I received an email from Air Canada saying that my flight had been changed from a regular Air Canada flight to a discount Air Canada "Rouge" flight. Anybody who knows Air Canada, knows that the Rouge option has historically been a poor flight experience. There have been recent improvements made, however that's because even Air Canada knew that Rouge had a bad reputation. Credit given to them for finally recognizing that, but it's still not what I paid for. I would not have bought the flight had I known it was going to be  Rouge flight. Simple as that.

There's an old joke that says Air Canada's motto is: "We're not happy until you're not happy".

So I went into the online system to cancel the flight and ask for a full refund. But the online system would only give me back about 30% of what I paid. So I didn't do anything for a week or so while I figured out what my next step would be. I ended up booking the Aeromexico flight because it had actually come down in price almost to the same amount. So now I had booked and paid for two flights at the same time!

I wrote an email to Air Canada asking for a refund. After a week, I had no response, and just for fun, I went back onto their website, and the cancellation page. To my surprise, the system now enabled me to obtain a full refund to my original form of payment! No idea why it was changed, but we got lucky on that one.

We've probably flown with Air Canada a dozen times over the years, and while most flights go as planned, our experience has been that when something goes wrong, they won't stand behind you as a customer. And worse still, if you do have to register a complaint and go over their head, the Canadian government won't stand behind you either. It's a sad situation for the airline consumer in Canada, especially compared to the system in the European Union where they truly do side with the customer rather than the airline. 

Anyhow, I won't make that mistake again. 

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