As Air Canada’s plan to resume flying unravels, thousands of British travellers face paying twice their original fare to get home – with the extra complication of US red tape.
Cabin crew for the Canadian airline walked out as part of a long and bitter pay dispute, and have ignored a government order to return to work. Hundreds of thousands of passengers have had their flights cancelled.
Seven members of two families from East Yorkshire are currently flying home from Seattle after paying over £1,000 each for replacement flights from Calgary to London Heathrow.
Pete Dearing, his wife, two daughters and three members of the Robinson family had been on a trip through British Columbia and the Canadian Rockies.
“The plan was for one night in Calgary just before we got the flight home,” he told The Independent. The families were due to fly nonstop from the Alberta city to Heathrow on Friday evening.
“We didn’t know anything about the strike at all,” he said. “It was only when we arrived in Calgary that we noticed that we had an email from Air Canada, basically preparing us that there might be a chance that our flight could be cancelled.”
The airline then claimed it had searched for flights on more 120 carriers to find an alternative way home, without success. It took the families a single call to a travel agent in the UK to find suitable flights: on Alaska Airlines to Seattle and then on Virgin Atlantic to Heathrow.
The fare was over £1,000 each and involved a five-hour stopover in the US – for which each of them required an Esta online permit, costing an extra $21 (£15) each.
“We feel like we’ve been abandoned,” Mr Dearing said. “We’re lucky in the fact that we can whack a flight on a credit card and sort it out later.”
The two families will touch down 48 hours late after a journey that took many hours longer than expected because of the need to fly in the wrong direction to the US west coast, wait for five hours and then take a longer flight home.
“We feel abandoned,” Mr Dearing said. “We certainly won’t be flying Air Canada again,” added his travel companion, Mark Robinson.
Had the families been travelling in the opposite direction, from the UK, air passengers’ rights rules would have required Air Canada to pay for alternative flights. Under British law the carrier must also provide hotels and meals during the wait. But under Canadian law carriers need not provide replacement bookings or cover accommodation costs when a strike causes cancellations.
The families’ next hurdle: Hull Trains from London King’s Cross to their home in Beverley. A strike by members of the train drivers’ union, Aslef, means some services are being cancelled. But all trains on Monday are shown as running normally.
The Canadian national carrier initially cancelled all flights from Friday night onwards after cabin crew announced a strike over a long and bitter pay dispute.
The government in Ottawa ordered a return to work while the dispute goes to arbitration. But flight attendants ignored the order.
Air Canada says: “The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) illegally directed its flight attendant members to defy a direction from the Canadian Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) to return to work.”
On each day that flights are grounded, a further 130,000 passengers are stranded.
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