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,…
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