On the 3rd of May I was flying on a business trip to PEN from YOW with connections in YYZ and and an overnight stay in HKG for a meeting with a client and some rest.
On the morning of the 3rd, the plane from YOW (AC441) never left the tarmac and 2 hours later all the passengers were de-planned due to a GPS computer malfunction that could not be fixed.. I pleaded with the ground-staff at YOW that my connection to HKG from YYZ was already gone, but they insisted on putting me on the next available flight to YYZ (AC445) and told me that have "tons" of option in YYZ. Basically, the tons of options turned out to be just one...next day flight to YVR and then a connection onwards to HKG!
The AC ground agent was extremely unhelpful and even rude... I asked her why they brought me to Toronto in the morning to spend a night, whereas they could have left me in Ottawa and I could have done some work and spent the night with the family.. also, the YVR routing, is more tiring, and I will miss my PEN connection from HKG, it was right there clearly on the print-out... She had no answer and told me to go upstairs and talk to ticketing if I didn't like the YVR route.
Ticketing was able to "fix" the routing to next day YYZ-HKG connection (the most logical route rather than the stupid YVR routing)... but the whole mess took almost 3 hours to sort out, the baggage retrieval alone took 1 hr as it was on route to YVR.
I wrote an e-mail to customer relation and got a canned reply from Michelle Sturge that summarizes to "too bad... crap happens... there is bad weather, sick pilots, etc,., etc... the best we can do is give you 25% off the next booking for all your troubles".
I missed a very important meeting in HKG due to this and had to incur the expense for the one night stay in a hotel in HKG..
Just want to know if I should be happy with this or should I push them to reimburse me for the 1-night penalty I had to pay to the hotel in HKG.
On a side note, the meal vouchers are a joke, you get $7 for breakfast, $10 for lunch and $15 for dinner... by the time I reached the hotel, lunch was already over so couldn't use that voucher.. the cheapest item on the dinner menu was like $28 and $7 wouldn't even buy a glass of OJ for breakfast...!
