$100 WS dollars for being Gold

Old Feb 17, 2015, 8:46 am
  #1  
Original Poster
 
Join Date: Dec 2002
Posts: 7,975
$100 WS dollars for being Gold

I think the first half of the first sentence is key. Other family members who haven't used their status didn't get this offer.

Got an e-mail...

Now that you've taken advantage of our Status Match incentive, you know how great our Gold flight benefits are. ... To help get you on your way, we've deposited $100 WestJet dollars into your account, which you can use on any WestJet flight or WestJet Vacations package, on any date with no blackouts.* But hurry, these bonus dollars will expire at the end of the month!

Book by: February 28, 2015 (9:59 p.m. MT)
tracon is offline  
Old Feb 17, 2015, 12:17 pm
  #2  
 
Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: Canada
Posts: 248
I got this too. Are there any existing promos that this could be combined with?
bjywong is offline  
Old Feb 17, 2015, 5:48 pm
  #3  
 
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: YYZ
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Posts: 383
I booked a flight but haven't flown it and got the email.

Good timing, looking to book another flight soon!
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Old Feb 18, 2015, 7:50 pm
  #4  
 
Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: YYC
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Posts: 11
$100 westjet dollars

you also have to be opted-in to get the 100...it looks like if you are not an opt-in no dollars were added
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Old Feb 20, 2015, 12:49 pm
  #5  
 
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: Calgary
Programs: Altitude E50K, WS Gold (status match)
Posts: 1,211
$100 WS dollars for being Gold

Bravo, WestJet! I think I'm gonna book a flight using these dollars. I want to try them out again.

Last edited by capebretonboy; Feb 23, 2015 at 11:10 pm
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Old Feb 23, 2015, 11:25 pm
  #6  
 
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: Calgary
Programs: Altitude E50K, WS Gold (status match)
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Well, I did it! I booked a day trip to Vancouver using the $100 credit. Again, this was a very nice gesture on the part of WestJet (in addition to the status match they gave me in December). I look forward to trying them out again and, who knows, they may win me over as a regular customer.

I will have to provide a bit of a post-trip report. Although so far, my interaction with WestJet has been great. For instance, I phoned in tonight to use my seat selection vouchers and 1) I got through on their reservations line almost immediately and 2) they booked me into an exit row seat as an exception - another nice gesture!
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Old Feb 25, 2015, 5:32 pm
  #7  
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Join Date: Mar 2010
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Originally Posted by capebretonboy
Bravo, WestJet! I think I'm gonna book a flight using these dollars. I want to try them out again.
Originally Posted by capebretonboy
Well, I did it! I booked a day trip to Vancouver using the $100 credit. Again, this was a very nice gesture on the part of WestJet (in addition to the status match they gave me in December). I look forward to trying them out again and, who knows, they may win me over as a regular customer.

I will have to provide a bit of a post-trip report. Although so far, my interaction with WestJet has been great. For instance, I phoned in tonight to use my seat selection vouchers and 1) I got through on their reservations line almost immediately and 2) they booked me into an exit row seat as an exception - another nice gesture!
We want to read your trip reports!
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Old Mar 8, 2015, 3:35 pm
  #8  
 
Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: YYZ/YUL
Programs: UA 1K, AC nadda, DL, WS-Nadda
Posts: 1,476
I took advantage and tried it on the last day of the promotion.
The good and the ugly I arrived YOW and went to check in for my return the next morning. Agent prints out BP and says your gold so we can put you in Plus for the return. Who knew.

All well and good. Next morning as I am about to head off to have breakfast with associate, trip case flags my flight is canceled. Nothing from WS yet. Call in and they have no information, told to call back. Itn showing flight is good. About 30 minutes later call in after receiving e-mail conformation that flight is indeed canceled. Rebooked late in the afternoon, no good have to be in Toronto by 14:00 not going to happen at least not with Westjet. However if I wanted they could put me on a flight an hour later, meaning I would have to get from downtown yow to the airport in 60 minutes and cancel the reason I was there in the first place.

Comments on the re-booking process horrible, The problem I am learning is westjet is a leisure airline. Their agents are not trained how to deal with Frequent flyers, they are trained to deal with people who love them and will take anything the airline offers.

After I passed on the late after noon flight, citing my needs to be back in Toronto I asked for the 1:40, they agent says its very full blah blah. I say too bad you are inconveniencing me so do it. Ok done. They they said I had to get seat selection at the airport, I said I was already as a gold given plus seating, and I know its available, again grudgingly they did it. I also wanted compensation for the aggravation, so they told me a supervisor would call me back they were busy. That was a mistake.

Again lets work from the premise that WS agents are not ready to to deal with experienced FF. She blamed the other employees for being new, not trained etc etc. In the end and it took a lot of pointing out how this should have been handled, they gave me 100$ credit. They offered to cancel and refund the ticket, but I would lose the 100$.

What I should have done:

Checking the AC site, there was a Flex fare on a much later flight for 100$ more than the refund would have been. AC was only showing J available through most of the day most every flight was zeroed in economy. Had I grabbed the late flight, I could have done same day stand-by. The flight that left the same time as the one that was canceled by WS went out with 4 stand-bys after the list of upgds had cleared. Being Alt I would have squeaked onto the flight.

The cancellation ( inbound aircraft went MX or so they say). I think they combined a bunch of flights due to low load factors.

1) there are not a lot of Tri-Angle flights so when they cancel there will be an impact that they will not be able to recover from as easily as PD or AC.

2) they do not handle knowledgeable frequent players who offer suggestions to get on their way very well. There too entrenched in a leisure airline mentality.


Would I fly them again, I would have to have a lot of time on my hands in case of Irops.
I would always consider it a bit of a risk. Chances of my flying them enough to hit the
6k to qualify for gold next year...I would have to really give it some thought.

I flew up on AC and that was a typical rapidair experience when everything goes right. Pushed early too.
45 open seats it was great.

The Westjet in-flight crew was very busy, the flight was full, and very short. We pushed late cuz the kettles do not understand concept of what you can bring on board, so the FA's worked hard to move stuff around to be able to close the bins and force carry-ons from the first row into whatever space they could find.
I would rate the crew as excellent.

Last edited by yul36; Mar 8, 2015 at 3:42 pm
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Old Mar 13, 2015, 1:06 pm
  #9  
Company Representative: WestJet
 
Join Date: Mar 2010
Location: Calgary
Programs: WestJet Rewards
Posts: 292
Thanks for your trip report, yul36. So sorry that you had such difficulty on this trip. Our flight completion rate and on-time performance statistics are generally very good and we hate to read of the inconvenience caused to you.

I'd like to pass your feedback about the call to our team leaders in the contact centre. We'll pull the recording of the call and see if there is some learning opportunities for our agent. Please send me a private message with your reservation code and details of the call (phone number, time etc.).

We hope to welcome you on board again soon and trust you'll a much less eventful, or even an enjoyable travel experience.

Thanks,
Darren
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Old Apr 25, 2015, 11:54 am
  #10  
 
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: Calgary
Programs: Altitude E50K, WS Gold (status match)
Posts: 1,211
My WS trip report

Darren, a.k.a. “WestJet” here on FT, was interested in hearing about my WS experience. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, before this trip, I had not flown WestJet since 2006. Apologies for the delay in posting.

I have been an E50K (*A Gold) member with Air Canada since about 2008. With WS status matching me and following up that status match with $100 WestJet Dollars, I felt it was a great opportunity to give them another try, so I planned a day trip to Vancouver and booked a return ticket from YYC-YVR to visit some friends. Here is my experience from start to finish.

Booking:
Booking my flight on WJ.com was very easy; however, there was a slight glitch. I was certain that I had signed into my WestJet rewards account before making the booking, but somehow I must have been logged out (or not logged in in the first place). When you complete your reservation outside of your login, you won’t be able to access your booking later through your WS account. On top of that, you can’t seem to add your reservation after the fact. This is very inconvenient and so you risk not having all your reservations show up under your account when you log in.
Because I could not access my booking through my WestJet Rewards account, I had to phone in to use my advance seat selection vouchers that were given to me during the WS status match (note: I believe I may have had to phone in regardless to use these vouchers, but I am not certain). The wait on the phone line was minimal, even though I was calling WestJet’s general reservation line and not a specific priority gold line. I know this would not be the case had I called AC’s general reservation line (can you say +1 hour wait?) Kudos to WS for clearly a better call centre experience. I also do know that WS offers call back service if the wait on line is too long: AC could learn a lot here. In any case, after a brief wait, the agent I dealt with was very friendly and immediately offered to place me in an exit row seat. She did not have to do this, so I thought it was a very nice gesture.

Date: March 14, 2015, Flight: WS545 YYC-YVR (1h23m flying time)

Check-in:
OLCI was very easy and I was able to print my boarding pass in the office. WS sends a number of reminder emails not only about your upcoming fight and check in, but they also set expectations as to baggage fees, carry on rules, etc. I think this is a very smart communications strategy on the part of WS – very proactive and again something AC could learn from.

At the airport:
Arriving at YYC, I was disappointed that WS did not have a dedicated Gold check in desk although I had no luggage so lack of a dedicated desk did not matter for this trip. I noticed at YYC that WS staff do a good job helping customers at the kiosks or directing customers to the appropriate check in lane. I was having trouble scanning my BP to get the return BP for my flight home from YVR and the WS agent immediately noticed me having this problem and approached me to show me how to use the 3D bar code scanner properly. Again, very proactive.

Security:
Priority security worked like a charm. I was through in under 5 minutes, easily. I must say I like the security area in the A section of YYC than I do the C section. The tables and lanes are much longer so there is much more room to move through security than in the AC area of YYC.

Lounge experience:
WS contracts the Servisair Lounge (The Chinook Lounge) at YYC. It was very spacious and quiet on this particular Saturday morning. While there was no warm food for breakfast, there was a decent selection of sandwiches, cereals, teas, coffee and other beverages. The only drawback to this lounge was the relatively late opening time of 6 a.m. which, when taking an early-morning flight, is much too late an opening time. They should consider extending opening hours to 4 or 5 a.m. Despite the late opening time, the lounge was open promptly at 6 a.m.

At the gate:
Boarding was effortless, but I am not sure it was because of my Gold status. What I can tell by the boarding process, WS calls parents with infants and exit row seat holders to board first, so I took advantage of that and boarded right away. I have heard that WS gate agents have not always been consistent with inviting Gold customers to board early; however, I did not wait around the gate area to test this. Speaking of boarding early, WS should consider having dedicated boarding lanes so that gold customers could proceed to the front of the boarding queue even when arriving late to the gate (much like what AC does with their zoned boarding signs and lanes). Also, strangely enough, my boarding zone was listed as zone 3 even though my boarding pass clearly stated “gold” – I am not sure why it did not default to zone 1 or at least zone 2 (after plus boarding), but perhaps this is simply an IT glitch.

One final thing to note about the gate experience, I filmed my trip with WS as part of a YouTube trip report (not finished yet). While I was using my camera around the gate, the gate agent asked me if I was filming. When I told her yes, she immediately admonished me and said: “you know you cannot film us, sir, without our consent.” In my opinion, this was a bit over the top. I was in a public area and I should be able to film when and what I please. This did not sit well with me and soured my WS experience just a little bit; it’s not exactly welcoming. I seem to recall a previous trip with WS where the staff were really picky about filming and I really can’t understand why they are so strict about this. Is this really all about WS carefully controlling its image? I do not know the answer to this, but would love to hear a good explanation.

On board:
The on-board experience was excellent. The exit row seating in 12A was an excellent choice and it is definitely one of the best seats on board the 737-700. Very spacious seating with tonnes of leg room – just what I value: comfort! Also, I should note that WS seats on board this particular aircraft were wider than I remembered. So overall comfort was quite good. Once on board, WS pushed back on time. WS ground staff waived us goodbye (nice touch!) and we had a very quick taxi to runway 17R – actually this was one of the quickest taxis and take offs I’ve ever experience at YYC. Of course, the position of the WS gates to 17R and the fact that flights were being cleared for take-off southbound on this particular morning really helped.

Cabin service was friendly, announcements were brief and infrequent and, most importantly, there were no corny jokes (thank goodness!) Meal service consisted of free beverages and snacks. The Wafer Master chocolate wafer cookies were very nice. I also had some OJ with a little bit of ice. One thing I noticed is that WS flight attendants sweep the cabin a second time very quickly picking up cups and other garbage items. This differs a lot from AC where your meal items might sit on your tray table for nearly an hour. I am not sure why AC flight attendant seem to be so absent from the cabin at times, but this was not the case on this WS flight.

We arrived on time at Vancouver and we parked at gate B21. I must say, I do find that WS parks in Canadian airport terminals which are not always the nicest or the most modern/up-to-date. This is a drawback to the WS experience. Although where WS is housed at YYC is on par - if not better - than other parts of that airport, I did not find this to be the case at YVR and I know it is certainly not the case at YYZ where WestJet’s home is in the old, tired Pearson T3.

The flight home from YVR was exactly the same experience and even the same seat (12A), so I won’t bore you with all the same details. However, one of my biggest pet peeves in this entire trip was the lounge experience (or lack thereof) at YVR. My flight that evening was the last flight of the day, WS604 departing at 21:45, but when I arrived at the Plaza Premium contracted lounge at YVR, I discovered that it closes at 8 p.m. on a Saturday. Seriously!?!? Big strike against WS. Airport lounges for top tier customers should stay open until 30/60/90/120 minutes prior to the last departure much like what you see with AC MLLs.

Overall, my experience with WS was great. Friendly, helpful staff, a safe, comfortable in-flight experience and some gold benefits sprinkled on top. It was a nice way to spend a Saturday. For the time being, however, my spend will largely remain with AC and *A carriers mostly for two reasons: 1) the contracted lounge approach by WS seems to offer less flexibility in terms of operating hours compared to the AC-owned (presumably owned) domestic MLLs. I am not sure if WS could contract better terms with lounge operators. 2) The lack of membership in a global airline alliance: this by far still offers the best value proposition for a FF and the fact that WS’s program does not extend beyond them as an airline is a big disadvantage. I have said it many times that if WS were to join an alliance it may push even more of AC’s top tier flyers over to WS. Lack of a J-cabin is also an issue for some, not for me so much, but this is something also that WS may want to consider.

I hope you enjoyed my trip report!

Happy flying! CBB

Last edited by capebretonboy; Apr 25, 2015 at 8:54 pm
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Old May 8, 2015, 9:18 am
  #11  
Company Representative: WestJet
 
Join Date: Mar 2010
Location: Calgary
Programs: WestJet Rewards
Posts: 292
We certainly enjoyed your trip report and it has been circulating around the Marketing floor here at the WestJet campus!

Most of your experience has been everything we've always been about: quickly answering the phone, speeding you through the airport and being attentive on board. We're glad to hear we're hitting the mark.

Constructive criticism is duly noted. We do speak with lounge partners regularly so that can be brought up. I've also asked a mutual friend to have you send a screenshot of the agent who was perhaps a bit abrupt in her response to the filming (which is OK, by the way - perhaps a personal safety or security consideration?). And we've heard loud and clear that y'all would like us to join a global alliance. Nothing to report about that on this end but we've stopped saying never ("we'll never fly east of Winnipeg." [Hello Glasgow!] "We'll never fly anything but a Boeing 737." [enter Qs and 767s!] "We'll never fly outside of Canada." [now nearly 20 countries!]).

We appreciate your details travel report, but are sorry to hear you'll still direct the majority of your travel toward our competitor. Do know you're welcome on board with open arms whenever you choose to fly with us.

Cheers,
Darren
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Old May 22, 2015, 10:47 pm
  #12  
 
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: Calgary
Programs: Altitude E50K, WS Gold (status match)
Posts: 1,211
Originally Posted by WestJet
I've also asked a mutual friend to have you send a screenshot of the agent who was perhaps a bit abrupt in her response to the filming
No problem Darren. I really enjoyed traveling with WS!
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