Originally Posted by
Lars Johansen
Its now 30 days since I sent my claim to Air Canada due to a delay that caused us to miss our connection, and had to pay for two nights accomodation out of my pocket. Should I wait for a reply or just send the case to the CTA?
I was hoping getting my expenses reimbursed by the insurance company instead of waiting for Air Canada, but they want an official statement from Air Canada regarding the delay. Flight affected, reason for delay etc.. pretty industry standard.
I filed an request for an insurance letter to Air Canada at the same time as my APPR claim. The response for an insurance letter came today, they even refuse to issue a letter
The response was:
Thank you for contacting us regarding the information you need to provide your insurance company.
If you experienced a flight disruption, the insurance company will accept a copy of the itinerary you received upon booking and any itinerary updates received thereafter, along with copies of any flight delay/cancellation notifications you received.
For the record I did not receive any delay notifications, only notification I got was when boarding started.
I have already provided this to the insurance company, yet they want an official statement. Which I can understand. I am quite suprised by this response by Air Canada, I have never - ever had problems getting an insurance letter / statement from an airline before.
Also this rejection makes me even more sure that I am eglible for compensation due to this delay.
You should wait for their response. I know it's hard hanging in there but by waiting for AC to respond you get their official position on the matter on record (i.e. in your email). In my case I submitted my APPR claim to them on June 28th and only yesterday received a response back (rejecting the claim since crew scheduling is something outside of their control). Armed with their official response, I can now approach CTA, ACCC, or a small claims court to seek compensation since they breached their contract with me regarding compensation and any court in the land will laugh at any argument that crew scheduling is a delay outside of their control. What is key is you need to give them the opportunity to investigate. That way you can claim to a judge or to the CTA that hey, we acted in good faith to allow them to investigate the matter before escalating, and when their investigation concluded that crew scheduling was not within their control, it became clear that the airline wanted to breach the contract they had with us.
You can track the progress of your APPR claim by visiting the Air Canada website. Click customer support on the top banner and when the customer support page loads, you'll see a red dot towards the lower right of your screen. Click on it and a chat window will appear. Enter your case number from the APPR claim and the chat bot will come back and provide you with an update on the claim. Most likely it will say that the case is still under investigation.
Hope that helps.
Originally Posted by
Adam Smith
That's wrong. It can be used to cover base fare, taxes, fees on flights, and certain ancillary services, e.g. seat selection, as detailed on
this page.
I just reread the official response provided by AC to my APPR claim and notice conflicting advice. After discussing the reason they believe the claim should be denied they say the following:
As a goodwill gesture, we’d like to offer you a one-time discount of $300 off the base fare on your next booking at aircanada.com. Below, we have provided your eCoupon number and instructions on how to receive your discount. If you incurred expenses due to the disruption of your flight, please reply to this email and attach the receipts for our review and consideration.
Meanwhile later on in the email when they provide details on the eCoupon it says the following for T&Cs:
Air Canada eCoupon is redeemable at designated locations towards the purchase of air travel and ancillary services offered by Air Canada, Air Canada Express and Air Canada Rouge operated flights. For ticket purchases, you can use up to two eCoupons provided the total cost of the ticket purchase is covered fully by both eCoupons. Only one form of payment is accepted when purchasing a seat or travel option for an existing booking. You cannot consolidate the value of multiple eCoupons onto a single one.
eCoupons cannot be used when completing a booking with your mobile device, for Flight Pass Purchases, to purchase an Air Canada Vacations package, when booking travel for a group of ten or more, for hotel or car reservations or onboard our flights.
You may be right Adam that it can be used across the board for AC flights but the email response is confusing at best about how said eCoupon can be used. Certainly, I won't be using this eCoupon as I plan on receiving the full $1,000 entitled to me due to the 16+ hour delay.
One other point I think is worth sharing for every single person on this forum and something that I hope everyone shares with friends and relatives is that filing an APPR claim is not a waste of time or energy. You will get something out of it even if you only fill out the form. At the very least you can almost certainly expect to receive some discount by way of eCoupon or % off base fare. And if you are persistent and principled you might even get a lot more for your troubles. Please folks, please, if you ever get delayed and fall within the APPR, submit the claim now, ask questions later.
What is unclear about APPR is how the CTA monitors the statistics on this. For instance, does Air Canada need to report to the CTA how many APPR claims they received? If so, then every claim we put forward will put more pressure on the CTA and Air Canada to do the right thing. The CTA may very well shrug off a couple of thousand of APPR claims filed by AC customers citing the pandemic, but when we're talking about tens or even hundreds of thousands of such claims, it will become apparent to the CTA that the airline is making a mockery of APPR.
-RooFlyer88