Originally Posted by pitz
I think AC is extremely shackled to a legacy world of old-fashioned business processes, requirements for interoperability, and very stringent training requirements for their employees. I believe these issues, and the culture that exists within AC, is causing many of the problems [...]
That's an excellent analysis.
However, it may not always be appropriate to compare processes of 'real' airlines, such as AC, to those of their 'simplified' counterparts, such as WestJet. WS is not a member of the IATA, AC is. Air Canada cannot redefine what it means by a 'ticket' or 'reservation', WestJet can.
On the other hand, there are certain things that are completely within AC's control. For example, how can a company (unless it's based in a certain region of the world that is still experiencing problems with modern telecom facilities), still use TELEX for sending messages between its call centre in Montreal and its offices in Calgary? It was also completely within AC's control to design a website that is compliant with the appropriate HTML standards. Instead, their development team spent their resources on creating code for displaying the "browser not supported" notice...