Originally Posted by
arf04
This is perplexing. I struggle to see what the possible gain to Westjet is by being so punitive. I hope the OP pushes back on this as it seems entirely unreasonable.
I ended up escalating to their Guest Support team, who indeed confirmed their new policy to that they are only willing to re-protect passengers on flights +/- 9 hours, even if there is minimal frequency on that route. This is the case regardless of whether this adds any connections, adds an infinite amount of travel time, you can't make it, etc. Any changes you request outside of +/- 9 hours is considered a voluntary change that you must pay out-of-pocket for, unless there just isn't any other flight within that timeframe, in which case THEN it moves to +/- 2 days.
That said, they did begrudgingly make an "exception" (and sure as heck let me know it), and re-protected me on a more suitable flight +1 day on inbound/outbound, so I am relatively satisfied, aside from wasting hours of my time trying to resolve this.
The other interesting part disclosed on that call, is that they are only willing to re-protect you on the same
fare class (not cabin class). So, for example, they refused to re-protect me on my desired return flight because we had booked "Econo" fares, and the only remaining fares were designated as "EconoFlex" fares, even though they are both in the economy cabin. Had I booked a "Basic" fare, I would've been completely SOL, and no options would've existed on pretty much any flight, as there are pretty much no basic fares left around my dates of travel.
Originally Posted by
Speedbird84
Massive yikes.
Between this and the Plus meals thread, it's hard to ignore the fact that in terms of policy and procedures the airline is being shifted into a low cost operation. How that jives with the long haul operation, Plus seating, and high fares.. definitely some level of an identity crisis happening.
The unfortunate part is the shadiness towards customers in being unable to be upfront about the changes they've been pushing out.
I agree. WestJet over the past few years has really been in an identity crisis. They are, at heart, a LCC carrier, but they seem to try to compete solely with AC, a full service carrier. AC offers much better routes, schedules, on-board hard/soft products, and now clearly better policies (who would've ever thought one would say that). If you want to have LCC policies, then you'd better charge LCC prices, which they simply don't do.
It drives me nuts how they think it's okay to change their policies at whim, without any understanding of how this affects passengers. A "major" change used to be considered 2 hours, now it's 3 hours. Further, they used to re-protect +/- 7 days for international flights, then moved it to +/- 3 days early in 2022, then to +/- 2 days in the summer of 2022, and now +/- 9 hours. Not as big of a deal if you're flying YVR to YYZ and there are several flights a day, but potentially catastrophic for customers when they're running only 1 direct flight on a route per day, like YVR-OGG.