Beverly Levesque says she’ll fly with Sunwing Airlines again despite enduring a delay riddled Cuban vacation with the low-cost airline that cost her and her partner hundreds of dollars.
The Brantford, Ont., resident and her husband are entitled to $2,800 in vacation credits after long waits attributed to several miscommunications which plagued the trip right off the top.
“Well, if they give me a big voucher and honour it, yes,” Levesque told 900 CHML’s Good Morning Hamilton when asked if she will use the carrier again.
Levesque is one of the many affected by Sunwing Vacations’ late December flight cancellations across Canada that saw the service scrambling to bring hundreds of passengers home from destinations as far as Mexico and Cuba.
Her fiasco started on day one of a planned vacation when airline staff at Hamilton International Airport told her the flight was delayed despite Sunwing’s website saying it was on time.
After a quick call instructing her daughter to drive back to give her and husband Fred a ride back to Brantford, a second attempt to get on a flight later that day would also fail when staff revealed it was put off again until the following day.
“We ended up taking a cab home,” explained Levesque who’s daughter couldn’t retrived them again due to dinner plans.
“They did offer us a hotel, but the hotel they offered we were not happy with. We’d rather, you know, stay at home and sleep in our own bed.”
At the airport the next day, she would be told her 8 a.m. Cuba flight wouldn’t be leaving until 9 a.m. as the airline waited for a flight crew to arrive from Toronto.
It wasn’t until about 6 p.m. that the couple would finally get on to a plane with a flight crew explaining they were not aware the couple were stranded in Hamilton.
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After spending several days in cold, overcast weather at a resort, Levesque and partner would be informed of further delays pushing back their three-hour Christmas Day return flight to Dec. 27.
Checking out of their room that day, they would be met by a third party agent, contracted by Sunwing, explaining buses to the airport had still not yet been sent to pick them up.
“They told us 9 a.m., so we checked out of our room early because we thought we were leaving,” Levesque shared.
“By 11 a.m., we were still sitting in the lobby.”
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With no lunch nor dinner, the pair wouldn’t be able to use the Varadero Airport VIP lounge service they paid a couple hundred dollars for when airline staff instructed them to rush to the gate since their plane was about to take off.
“We were in line checking our bags and all of a sudden we get a call, ‘anybody going to Hamilton has to come through now because the plane is loading,'” Levesque recalled along with memory of an in-flight meal of nachos she had to pay for.
“So by the time I got home, it was like 5:15 p.m. at night.”
In a joint-statement on Thursday, Sunwing’s CEO and president apologized to travellers across Canada for “failures of execution” and letting customers down over the Christmas holidays.
In the note from Sunwing Travel’s Stephen Hunter and the airline’s Len Corrado, the two attributed the disruptions to “weather-related delays” that limited their ability to reposition aircraft and crew to other airports to help alleviate a backlog in flights.
“Whereas several larger carriers faced similar issues in the spring and summer over their first peak travel season since the pandemic, we are facing those challenges and obstacles during our peak season this winter,” the response said.
The airline says its “roadmap” going forward includes a mitigation plan to address flight alert notifications and enhancing the communication to customers as well as reducing capacity on some January flights.
The fallout from Sunwing’s troubles in December has spurred on a threat from a Regina firm over a potential class action lawsuit while federal transport minister Omar Alghabra says he’ll seek “a plan” to strengthen the rules for air passengers.
The Liberals did introduced the Air Passenger Protections Regulations in 2019, establishing minimum standards of treatment that airlines have to provide to passengers for delays that are within their control.
But the president of an airline advocacy group is pointing the finger at the ministry and its regulations, saying what was seen in the Sunwing occurrence is “evidence and a consequence” of a systemic lack of enforcement.
“The cabinet could actually issue marching orders to the federal regulator, the Canadian Transportation Agency, to start enforcing the law properly,” Gábor Lukács of Air Passenger Rights told Global News.
“They could also make some interim measures if there is significant risk of disruption of air travel in Canada.”
Alghabra told Global News in an interview that the ministry is “consulting with Transport Canada” on beefing up protections.
“We’re looking forward to figuring out what other measures can we put in our passenger bill of rights to make sure that the airlines are the ones who are responsible for these claims, not the CTA (Canadian Transportation Agency),” Alghabra said.
Levesque says Sunwing’s compensation is either $500 cash for each of their flights or four $700 vouchers for a future trip with the airliner.
She says she and Fred will be taking the latter and booking another trip right away considering they haven’t travelled out of the country since 2019 due to COVID restrictions.
“Yeah. We’ll give them another chance,” she said.
“But, if it all goes wrong this time, I’ll never go with them again.”
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