Grounded: one man’s airline hell

My son Scott recently experienced a truly dreadful experience trying to fly out of Ottawa. Here’s his blog …

When I was a young man, I visited a friend of mine in Austin, Texas. One of the unpleasant byproducts of visiting The United States is dealing with the American airline industry. The United States has a number of regional airlines, but there is a big four – Delta, American Airlines, Southwest, and United – who make up close to 70% of American flights. For perspective, each of them are more than 3x the size of Air Canada. For more, check out David Dayen’s incredible book, Monopolized, gets into granular detail about how American monopolies work, and has a chapter devoted to air travel in the United States.

On my trip home, I waited in the Minneapolis airport for a connection that was delayed. Then delayed again. Then delayed again. Then delayed again. Each time, the expected departure time moved by 30 to 45 minutes. Finally, they announced the flight wouldn’t take place until tomorrow, gave us a $7 food voucher (ed note: the food voucher was for airport food, but was not accepted at nearly every airport vendor, best illustrated by this classic Simpsons bit). The people at whatever airline I was flying with (one of the big four, I can’t remember which) then put us up in a truly horrible hotel 35 minutes from the airport, and told us to come back at 6 a.m. the next day.

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It sucked, but while it sucked, at least I knew the general plan.

Canada has two major airlines (Air Canada and WestJet, nearly half the size of Air Canada), and a number of smaller regional flyers. We’ve seen a rise in “discount” airlines in recent years, most notably Swoop and Flair. Swoop is fully owned by WestJet, but functions – I use the term “functions” loosely – as a separate entity.

Discount airlines provide less service, smaller seats, charge you for carry-on bags, but they are indeed a lot cheaper. And they provide direct flights that those of us in the vast expanses of Western Canada have not been able to take without shelling out a lot of money. This includes places like Halifax and Ottawa.

I am not a naïf; when things are a lot cheaper, there are generally consequences. But Canada, in my 38-year experience, legislates against many of the worst things we see in, well, the United States. And while I’m no fan of Air Canada and WestJet, the Canadian airline industry is usually functional. I assumed that the Canadian discount airlines would cut all sorts of things, but still, generally, you know, function.

I was wrong. That’s on me. I am a naïf.

Before I go on, it’s worth mentioning you may get lucky. My flight out to Halifax was event-free; sure there was less legroom, sure it had no perks, but it was cheap. Great. As advertised!

After a few weeks out East, I ended up in Ottawa, and it was time to come home.

The first flight delay came with plenty of notice. Instead of leaving at 3 p.m. on Friday, my flight had been moved to 10:30 p.m. on Friday. Definitely inconvenient for those of us who have to check out of our hotel room, etc., but not out of the realm of acceptable behaviour. And who knows, maybe I’ll get compensated!

That Friday I woke up, to receive an automated message from Swoop. My flight had been cancelled due to “External Safety Reasons.” But I was assured they are working to rebook us.

Later in the day, I received another email, to inform me of my new travel time. When I opened it, it told me:

After logging in, I found out my flight was delayed until 11:30 p.m. – the next day. That was definitely not good news, but at least there was a flight time, albeit a lousy one. Throughout the day, I received emails about a different size of plane. This reassured me there was, indeed, a plane.

After spending another day in an unseasonably warm Ottawa, I went to the airport. The airport was eerily empty. I arrived to find out that there was no plane, and due to a WestJet system-wide failure, they couldn’t notify me. I was to go home, and wait for an email. But it would take a while, because the system was down.

This feels like a good time to address a few things. I’m sure you’re wondering: well, why didn’t you reach out to Swoop and find out what’s going on?

Swoop has two ways to reach them.

1) By phone. The automated recording tells you to reach out to them online, as the phone is no longer monitored by a person.

2) Online. Where you can expect to receive a response *within 72 hours*. When you do receive a response, it is automated, and once you reply, don’t expect another response for 72 hours.

There is no physical Swoop presence at the airport; staff arrive a bit before passengers (one cancellation was pretty obvious when there wasn’t even a Swoop desk). And since the Ottawa International Airport has removed information, help desks, or, well, people, there is no in-person support to find. WestJet – which owns 100% of Swoop – will not acknowledge Swoop as their airline, and their staff tell you there is nothing they can do about Swoop flights.

So back to the hotel. The next morning, Swoop sends another automated email. I had been rebooked for 7 p.m. the next night. So I had two options – book an Air Canada flight around 4 p.m., pay upwards of $800, and arrive a few connections later – or try Swoop again. Swoop will not refund your money, so that’ll become an insurance fight at best.

Judging by travel itineraries online, there appeared to be a Swoop flight coming in from Edmonton at 6 p.m., so it stood to reason that may be my flight home. The arrivals and departures at the Ottawa airport was littered with errors (the wrong flight numbers, two planes arriving at the same gate, literal typos), but it appeared my flight was coming. It was not longer titled Swoop, but the mysterious “KF.” An internet search didn’t come up with an explanation for why that was.

After killing another day, it was back to the airport. You start to get to know the same passengers at this point. I was optimistic the flight from Edmonton would arrive at 6 p.m., and I would take it home at 7 p.m.

That 6 p.m. flight didn’t arrive. Despite monitoring all outgoing travel from Edmonton, a notice flashed up at 5 p.m. that the Edmonton flight departed four hours late. Any hope of getting home was dashed (I would late learn that flight wasn’t for us anyway).

At 7:10 p.m. – 10 minutes after the flight was scheduled to leave – we had our first interaction with Swoop employees. Swoop sent three young guys out to sheepishly tell the enraged passengers that there would be no flight tonight.

When was the next flight?

They didn’t know.

Would we fly out tomorrow?

Don’t know.

Can we talk to your manager?

“If we call that number, they’ll just hang up. And only we can call that number.”

Can I get reimbursed?

“No. We can’t do that.”

Can you book us on another airline?

“I wish I could, but the system won’t let me. You’ll have to watch for an email.”

These three young guys who had to sit there and take it took it like champs. The only Swoop employees we actually encountered were almost always pleasant, and had that look of people who knew they were working for a terrible company. I managed to pull one aside, and run my working theory by him – that they were hoping enough of us were to give up, that they could pile us in to an already scheduled flight the next day.

“Pretty much,” he told me.

What were our odds of leaving the next day?

“50%?” one said.

“80%?” the other said.

And why was the flight delayed?

One told us “staffing issues,” the other said “birds” had flown into an engine, delaying the flight.

Three days late, and with no rescheduled flight… back to the hotel. The hotel that I was paying for, because Swoop doesn’t help you with things like that. At least I had a new email penpal.

At this point, I started looking for alternative transportation home. As Swoop had continually screwed us, some passengers scrambled to other flights, which were predictably expensive. Even then, the decision was made – once the latest Swoop flight failed to appear, it would be Air Canada at any cost tomorrow.

Swoop emailed me the next morning at 5 a.m. I had a flight at 9 a.m.

That changed an hour and a half later, to a noon departure. It was still with the mysterious “KF” code. Seats had been changed, I was now in Row 24.

Somewhat incredibly, a flight was there, and staff were there. But it wasn’t Swoop staff, but rather KF, a Kelowna-based flyer that had two planes. They were contracted by Swoop to get us home. At this point, it was a mere 32 passengers – the rest had broken down and booked other flights. Even then, my seat number was for a seat that didn’t exist, and my boarding pass had the wrong code, and departure time. But these were trivial issues at this point.

The Kelowna Flyer staff told us that they flew in yesterday, but they were *never* leaving on the 7 p.m. Sunday night flight, because they had already worked too many hours in a row. Their last flight left early Sunday morning with the understanding they would not be leaving until Monday. Swoop still made us go to the airport, wait for hours, for a flight that they knew – nearly a day in advance – was never arriving.

The only question I have left about Swoop is whether their negligence is willful, or due to a complete lack of systems and organization. Their staff seemed to imply it was willful, as if this was part of the business model.

Swoop and their parent company, WestJet, will blame many of these issues on their “system outage” on Saturday. Putting aside whether we should be so completely dependent on a system that it can shut down an entire industry (See: Rogers and Interac earlier this year), that could conceivably explain the Saturday screw-up, but not the other three days.

Lastly, I lost three days because of Swoop. Some passengers lost more – one told me her original flight was supposed to leave Thursday. And I am fortunate all things considered; I missed a weekend and a day of work. On Saturday night, one woman cried as she couldn’t get home to a sick family member, and one said she was going to miss an operation she had scheduled.

Swoop is a despicable company, and if you go online, you’ll read about many irate people like me. But much of this falls at the feet of our Federal Government, who are typically asleep behind the wheel (in basically everything). I spent a lot of the weekend reading legislation, and while “major” airlines like Air Canada and WestJet would owe me $1000, Swoop is not a major airline, despite, you know, being fully owned by one. They are only required to reimburse you $500, which I will only receive after a lengthy insurance fight that apparently takes many months. After reading about the staffing calamity at Pearson International Airport earlier this year and experiencing this, it’s disgraceful that our elected officials are doing so little to help Canadians.