Originally Posted by
Lars Johansen
As expected Air Canada turned down my claim
I do not believe this
I followed the incoming flight on FR24.
The incoming plane that was originally schedueled to fly out again as our flight, arrived at YYZ 4 hours before schedueled departure, but was then changed to another flight number.
The original scheduled plane left for another destination 15 minutes after we had our schedueled departure
The plane that eventually departed as our flight had arrived from London 45 minutes(this flight even arrived earlier than schedueled) before our schedueled departure
Of course Ground handling will have problem to do a turnaround of a 777-300 in 45 minutes...
All the delay notification we got on SMS/mail stated it was due to late arrival of aircraft(even that was incorrect)
Even the captain said it was due to late change of aircraft...
What are my options? I really dont want AC to get away with this.
As I am not a Canadian am I able to do small claims or is CTA my next step?
Let me guess they gave you a $500 eCoupon as a goodwill gesture? I've put in two claims to Air Canada thus far and have received two eCoupons one for $300 and another for $500 as a gesture of goodwill. Clearly I don't think AC would be throwing around all of this funny money if they didn't recognize they were wrong here and want appease most people so they don't have to take it to the CTA or small claims court.
In terms of options you have a couple: you can appeal the finding to the CTA. The adjudication process may take over a year and there is no guarantee the CTA will rule in your favour, although they have in recent times called such excuses BS when
Air Canada and
West Jet raised them. They have also
recently ruled that AC and WestJet cannot use COVID as an excuse for taking more than 30 days to respond to APPR claims by customer too. The benefit of using this process is it's cheap (basically fill out a form and wait for the CTA to rule). In addition by filing a formal complaint the CTA has another data point they can use when determining whether airlines are following the regulations.
Another alternative is to fill a small claims action in court suing the airline for breach of contract since Air Canada, WestJet and other airlines now must put in their contract of carriage language that they will compensate you with cash in the event of a delay. With this legal theory we aren't arguing about APPR anymore (which is useful if you are suing them outside of Canada) but rather the legal theory of breach of contract. They promised to compensate you with cash for delay but refused to do so breaching their contract with you. The benefit here is you can pursue them anywhere in the world with such action and once you get a judgement that's as good as cash (particularly if the airline operates out of the country you are suing from). The other benefit of such an approach is that the airline may realize that the cost for them to argue their case in court will cost far more than to simply pay you out the judgement, particularly if you are pursuing them in an overseas court. The downsides here are of course the cost of filing the action (could be a hundred dollars or more to file the paperwork with the court and to send notice to AC).
What would obviously be ideal I think would be a class action lawsuit with everyone who has been impacted by these meritless denials by the airlines. Whilst many people would have second thoughts about filing the paperwork and showing up to court to pursue an airline, many would have no qualms signing an affidavit saying an airline wrongly denied them compensation to receive their compensation as a member of the class.
-RooFlyer88