An alternate title for this post is "How Westjet Forced Me To Go From Loving It To Embracing Air Canada".

My wife and I have been big fans of flying Westjet vs. AC for a long time. It had this quirky cool reputation for being the "fun" airline, the staff were usually smiling and seemed happy, and they mostly treated us like valued guests when flying, even when in economy class. But they've lost me as a customer, and here's why. Simply put--their website and post-booking IT services are the pits if you're booking a flight that is paid for wholly or in part with Westjet Dollars.

I just booked Air Canada flights a few months ago using my Aeroplan points. I had several changes I wanted to make after booking the flights, and all the changes were quick and easy to do online. I changed our seats; I cancelled a flight booking and then rebooked it with Aeroplan points; I changed a flight after the rebooking and then changed seats again. All simple and easy to do on aircanada.com, even though I booked with Aeroplan points and paid the taxes/fees with my credit card.

Contrast that with my experience booking with Westjet yesterday using my Westjet Dollars. I made the initial booking, but because I was in a hurry and was at work at the time, I accidentally booked the wrong date (Feb 7 vs. 14). My fault for sure, granted. But then instead of being able to simply access the booking online and change the flight, I had to actually contact Westjet--solely because I had booked the flight using WJD.

I first tried their Twitter direct messaging agents--they told me "nope, we can't do that for you, you have to actually call a Westjet Agent on the phone." So I phoned in and sat on hold for literally three hours just so I could physically speak to someone just to change the date, which took all of 60 seconds to do.

This morning, I just realized in looking at Seatguru that by sheer chance, the seats we picked are in a row that has no window. Again, with Air Canada, even if I'd booked using Aeroplan points, this would be trivial to do online and would take two seconds. But with Westjet, now I'm going to have to sit on hold for hours if I want to get the seats changed, just because I'm using WJD.

And finally--we had to do all kinds of gymnastics in booking the flights because unlike Aeroplan, there is no sharing/pooling of WJD/Travel Bank. With Aeroplan, we pooled our points together and just booked round trip flights on one reservation, easy peasy. With Westjet, we had to book a one-way itinerary under my wife's account for both of us (using a companion voucher), then we had to separately book one-way itineraries alone coming back, just because of how the math added up in terms of maximizing our WJD/Travel Bank in our respective accounts. Sure, I suppose we could contact Westjet to link our itineraries under one PNR--but again, that would entail a phone call and long on-hold time.

The fact that everything has to be done over the phone with Westjet when using WJD, unlike Air Canada, is likely part of why they are having massive on-hold times. A ton of their calls could be avoided if they simply adjusted their website to be able to handle WJD bookings seamlessly online, and instituted WJD sharing. The money spent to upgrade their website to handle this would easily be paid for by the amount they'd save in terms of having to hire staff to answer a ton of phone calls.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. Just frustrating to have to embrace Air Canada when I really would like to continue using Westjet, but it's just not worth the hassle to us anymore.