It was supposed to be a relaxing and fun vacation in a sunny destination to celebrate their birthday.
However, John Tiu and his wife’s journey were prey to flight delays when they left Halifax. They are now blocked at an airport in the Dominican Republic.
“It’s also like a traumatic experience not to know when you go home,” said Tiu on Thursday afternoon.
It is one of the hundreds of customers from Sunwing Airlines dealing with cancellations and delays after the consecutive winter storms hit eastern Canada and a Delta plane accident in Toronto’s Pearson International Airport which closed two tracks.
Sunwing has canceled all departure flights south of Toronto for a second consecutive day, as well as those who leave from Montreal, because it deals with the backwards and focuses on passengers blocked in tropical destinations.
Sunwing flights inside and outside other Canadian airports, including those of the Maritimes, show delays and cancellations.
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Tiu, whose a week’s vacation has extended in nine days, says that it feels that Sunwing has not communicated properly with them.
“These two times we were there (at the airport), we were not told what to do, nor that we are going to fly today, no excuses at all or nothing,” he said.
He adds that the airline has even forgotten to tell them that it was linked to their hotel after additional delays in their return to Canada.
“If we do not return to the hotel, we would never have known that there would be another room reserved for us,” he said.
So far, he estimates that the couple has accumulated about $ 1,000 in unexpected expenses.
Kelly Rowat in New Brunswick faces the opposite problem. She tries to go to Sunny Cayo Coco de Merry Moncton, NB, and impatiently checks the online schedule.
She and her husband canceled their original flight after several delays. At one point, they even received a message saying that the flight was going to be dropped a few minutes later.
“Twenty minutes after the” Oh yeah, you go on time, it’s 7 pm “… to cancel,” she recalls.
The couple is now linked to a flight on Saturday, but they are not convinced that they will take off.
The situation riddled her with anxiety but she says that she hesitates to cancel the trip for fear of losing her money.
“I am physically and mentally exhausted and I haven’t even got there,” she said.
The defender of the rights of air passengers Gábor Lukács says that Sunwing should offer their customers alternative flights to another airline and encourage people who are fighting for compensation to carry their business before the court of small complaints as opposed to the federal regulator .
“They have more than 80,000 complaints back. It will therefore take up to two years for your complaint to be examined, and even less decided, “he said.
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