Vancouver's Toast

Well, the last 24 hours have been very frustrating. It started at around 3:30pm as we left the Boston Waterfront Hotel and headed to Logan Airport. Our original flight was supposed to leave at 6:30pm, bounce through Toronto, and get us back into Vancouver at around 11pm PST. Once we got to the airport they informed us that our 6:30pm flight would be cancelled, but there was one at 7:30pm we could catch. This also changed our Toronto-Vancouver lag of the journey, getting us at home (in theory) at around midnight.

We weren’t that concerned about this at first, since it gave us a few hours to drink and hang out in the bar. We got on the plane to Toronto at 8pm, and had a pretty uneventful flight. About 20 minutes after we landed, we’re all standing in the lineup at Canadian Customs, and Aaron looks over at me.

Aaron: “what time is out flight leaving?”
Me: “9:55pm”
Aaron: “what time is it now?”
Me: “9:51pm”

We followed the rest of the cattle through the Canadian custom’s line, and got into yet another line, reserved for people who Air Canada has just fucked. The guy comes up to the line and starts asking people “anyone going to Ottawa? go here. Anyone going to Montreal, go there.” Chris yells “what about us guys heading to Vancouver.”

Stupid Air Canada Employee: “Vancouver’s Toast.”
Chris: “What do you mean Vancouver’s Toast?”
Stupid Air Canada Employee: “Vancouver’s Toast.”
Chris: “Put us on another flight.”
Stupid Air Canada Employee: “There are no other flights.”

They filed us up to the counter one by one like a bunch of lemmings, and each of us asked for some kind of love, either in the form of a free hotel room, or some kind of upgrade on the next flight, but we all got nothing. My guy even went so far to agree with everything I said, even though he didn’t offer anything in return.

So, not only were we stuck in Toronto for the night, we had to pay for it ourselves. We got to the hotel at around midnight, had a bit to eat, and headed to our rooms for the 4am wake up call to head to the Airport. And here we are, stuck in Air Canada hell, waiting to get on a plane back to Vancouver, where I can spend all day in bed recovering from Air Canada’s fuck up.

I think it’s nearly unanimous that none of us are going to fly Air Canada ever again after the terrible customer support we all got. Who the hell says “Vancouver’s Toast” to their customers when they’re obviously really upset and just want to get home. The guy even had the balls to come up to us later and see if we wanted to pay Air Canada some more money to get a better seat on some flight the next day. We were like “are you *#(% joking?”

Air Canada’s Toast.

ps – check out Clay’s post about the event.