Not sure if anybody else has encountered this recently, but here is how we almost got screwed out of a long-haul flight by Air Canada:


Here is a brief timeline of events leading up to us almost not making our flights and our long-awaited family reunion with my 2 estranged children.

• In Spring 2016 we were invited to visit a family member who lives on a pacific island in early 2017 for a family reunion, with a family member we had not seen for over 12 years.

• Due to my wife’s medical issues with long haul flights we decided to fly Premium Economy and started to watch prices on the Air Canada website.

• On October 16th 2016 the prices for 2 return tickets in Premium Economy were now within our budget and we booked and paid for them on that day.

• In October we received our RBC Visa statement and noticed that Air Canada took payment for our tickets on October 16th, they were processed by RBC on October 18th, we paid our Visa account in full that month as we do not carry a debit balance on our card.

• Around December of 2016 I entered our traveller details on the Air Canada website and each time I checked our bookings the message “Your flight is confirmed, there is no need to reconfirm this flight” appeared.

• On January 17th we received an email asking us to bid on upgrades on the domestic legs of our flights, which we did not bother doing as it was far too expensive for a short haul flight.

• On January 26th while I was at work we received an email advising us that we could now check in for our flight, I attempted to do this on line without success, our flight was departing on Jan 27th.

• As I work at the Edmonton Airport I was able to walk to the terminal and spoke to an Air Canada ticketing agent who advised me that our tickets had been “Revoked” and were no longer valid.

• They phoned Air Canada head office and spoke to a ticketing supervisor who only said “It was probably Royal Bank Visa who canceled the tickets (something RBC Visa has now told us they cannot physically or legally do), the original booking was now "locked", they can t see “who cancelled them or why” and then they hung up on the Edmonton Ticketing agent.

• The agent in Edmonton advised me that our flights were still available, our original seats were still there but we would have to purchase the same seats all over again if we wanted to have a chance of getting onto our flight the next day, by this time our flight was departing in less than 10 hours time.

• The Edmonton agent was very helpful and apologetic about the situation appeared embarrassed by the response that they had received from head office.

• As we had not budgeted to pay for our tickets twice, I had to transfer $5000.00 from our Line of Credit into our Visa account to cover the cost of these second tickets, with time running out it was an essential thing to do in order to secure our already paid for seats, seeing my family again was the main focus at that time. We are still paying that money back slowly onto our line of credit but are, of course, having to pay interest on that $5000.00 until it has been repaid in full.

The issue really is how can an airline charge twice for a service that we only received once, then sit on our $7100.39 for over 4 months before refunding the money to us, and then have the insensitivity and nerve to suggest that we cancelled one of our tickets ourselves when this reunion was so important and meaningful to my family and then, when they got caught in their own lie, they had the nerve to charge us $200 for a ticket refund on tickets that we should never have had to pay for twice anyway, our lawyer actually said that it sounds like “Grand Theft over $5000” if they are disputing both tickets, or “Theft under $5000” if they are trying to “Claim Back” they cost of only one of our tickets.

This did not make the first week of our long awaited family reunion go very well when I was emailing RBC Visa Disputes every day, and we were concerned about not having enough spending money left on our RBC Visa for the duration of our 3 week trip.

From talking with my work colleagues it appears several others have encountered a similar problem with Air Canada in the past 12 months, I hope it is not the start of some new ticketing scam in an effort to extort passengers at short notice who think that they have confirmed flights only to find out, at the last minute,that their tickets have been cancelled and they have to pay yet again for a new set of identical tickets at short notice.


All comments are welcome, I was advised to contact the Air Canada Ombudsman but I'm not sure if they exist anymore, In addition to refunding the accrued interest on our Line of Credit, we are also expecting compensation for the mental and emotional stress we suffered during our vacation, I sent a complaint to the official Air Canada complaints department, they acknowledged receipt and said it would be dealt with in 25 days, it is now 30 days and no reply from them.


All advise from anybody would be greatly appreciated at this time and I hope nobody ever has to go through this experience like we did.