An Ontario woman accompanying her daughter’s grad trip to the Dominican Republic said her group was left stranded after Flair Airlines cancelled their flight back to Toronto due to bad weather.
Deanne Trinka and her husband, Jason Butler, of Burlington, Ont. made the trip to Punta Cana on Aug. 10 to chaperone the group of four graduates.
Trinka said the seven-day trip itself went smoothly. It wasn’t until they were scheduled to fly back to Pearson International Airport that things took a turn.
Their flight with the low-cost carrier was scheduled to depart Punta Cana on Aug. 17 just after 7 p.m., but was cancelled due to a storm in Toronto.
It’s at that point, Trinka said, that the 123 passengers on the cancelled flight were told the next available Flair flight back to Toronto would depart two weeks later.
“What really bothers me is we were all initially told that we had to wait until August 31,” Trinka told CTV News Toronto.
Trinka, who used to work as a flight attendant for Flair, said multiple flights to Toronto with other airlines were available on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, but they weren’t rebooked to fly until Tuesday. Butler and one member of the group were rebooked on an Air Canada flight. Trinka, her daughter, and two other group members followed on a WestJet flight later that evening.
While Flair covered the cost of the replacement return flights for Trinka’s party, she said her group ran up $1,200 to $1,500 in extra costs on food and accommodation during their unplanned extra three-day stay in the DR.
She said Flair did not offer any kind of food vouchers. Butler was also required to pay to check his luggage on their return flight with Air Canada, Trinka said.
“When I worked for them, I was very proud. I always vouched for them,” Trinka said. “But after seeing the way that they treated people, you know, as a customer, it just changed my whole view of that airline.”
Butler added that while he understands weather conditions are out of an airline’s control, he said Flair customers could have been treated better.
“It would have been much better customer service to us as passengers to be compensated and made to feel safe and taken care of, which we were not.”
Flair says rebooking passengers is not a ‘seamless process’
In a statement to CTV News Toronto, Flair cited the record-breaking storm that poured nearly two month’s worth of rain on the city in just a few hours as the reason for the cancellation.
“The storms in YYZ caused massive disruptions across all airline networks, including Flair’s network. For the safety of passengers and crew, the decision to cancel the flight from PUJ to land in YYZ was made out of an abundance of caution,” Kim Bowie, Flair’s director of communications, said in an email.
Bowie said all 123 passengers on the flight were contacted about the cancellation and have all been informed of their options, to book a return flight with Flair or another carrier if they haven’t already done so, at Flair’s expense.
“While we offer to rebook all customers, their feedback has been that we could be more proactive in communicating other options,” Bowie said, adding that the process in getting passengers back home after the cancellation “is not a seamless process.”
Passengers could take airline to court: passenger rights expert
Gabor Lukacs is the president of the advocacy group Air Passenger Rights and said even though the cancellation appears to be outside of Flair’s control, due to the weather, affected passengers could still be entitled to compensation beyond having their return flights reimbursed.
He said that because Flair is considered a “large” carrier under the Air Passenger Protection Regulations (APPR), it is required to offer passengers alternate transportation on its own or partners’ flights departing within 48 hours of the original departure time shown on the passenger’s ticket.
“If Flair was unable to do so, then under s. 18(1.1)(a) of the APPR, Flair was required to rebook the passenger on the ‘next available’ flight of any carrier, including competitors,” Lukacs said in an email.
Since Flair “failed” to comply with its rebooking obligations, according to Trinka, Lukacs said the airline must not only pay for the cost of alternate transportation purchased, as Flair said it had done, but also any expenses incurred by passengers between the first available flight back to Toronto and the flight which brought them home.
“If Flair refuses to pay, I would take the airline to small claims court, not the Canadian Transportation Agency that is known for its cozy relationship with the airlines,” he said.