WestJet says it is investigating how passengers on an international flight ended up spending an extra 33 hours in Mexico, without the use of hotel rooms the airline believed would be available.
“This certainly was not a shining moment for WestJet, and we are sorry for what did transpire,” WestJet vice-president of marketing and communications Richard Bartrem told CTV Ottawa.
“Ordinarily we are good at this sort of thing. The unfortunate case this time around was that we weren’t.”
Flight 2841 from Cancun, Mexico, to Ottawa was supposed to take off Saturday morning.
After spending more than four hours on the tarmac, the 150 or so passengers on the plane were told that they would not be flying out that day at all.
Passengers have complained that they were only offered a small snack and a glass of water during the tarmac delay. According to WestJet, that was because the plane was constantly in motion during that time – preparing to take off, then having a mechanical issue checked out, then repeating that process – which made it unsafe to serve any more food.
“We do understand how this rolling delay followed by the cancellation was an extremely tough situation for guests to endure,” the airline said in a statement.
Once the flight was cancelled, passengers were told they would be bused to a hotel to spend the night. For at least some of the passengers, things didn’t turn out that way.
“In this particular instance, there was some crossed wires in terms of what we believed were going to be available rooms,” Bartrem said.
“When they got to those hotels, there were not rooms that we expected to be available.”
Some passengers ended up arranging their own accommodations for the night, before flying out the following day.
“We weren’t expected to be dumped by WestJet, and that’s what happened,” passenger Betty Clarke told CTV Ottawa.
WestJet has said it will cover affected passengers’ expenses and provide them with additional reimbursement as a gesture of goodwill.
Passengers say the airline has told them that goodwill payment works out to an extra $100 per person, in the form of a voucher for a future flight.
The federal government recently unveiled plans for a so-called air passenger bill of rights, which mandates a minimum rebate of $1,000 for flight delays of nine hours or more. However, delays caused by emergency maintenance needs would not necessarily qualify for the rebate.
The proposed regulations are currently open to public consultation. They are expected to be finalized later this year.
Chris Spiteri, a lawyer who was on Flight 2841, says he’s working to set up a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all passengers.
“They abandoned a whole planeload of passengers in a parking lot,” he said Tuesday.
“That’s a very different situation than just a delay.”
