First Lins77, this is not just a first world problem, in the traditional sense of the phrase. This is not whining about not getting an upgrade (although there was mention of upgrade issues, but not the point of the post), it is about a complete shutdown of a booking system for a major piece of the Canadian transportation system. This is about people trying to get to business meetings, people trying to get to family emergencies and any number of other possibilities and there will be, in many cases, no other options.
Now to what I was actually going to write about before that silly comment caught my eye!
We will be flying Edmonton to Dubai (connecting in Toronto) on the 21st and I am concerned about what this might do to us. I left a 10 hour connection and 10 other possible routings that they could switch us to and still make our connection, but if our flight gets cancelled and they can’t move us to another that day, we are screwed. (yes, Lins77, in our case, this is a first world problem!)
For them to do it in the winter (in Canada), when there are very likely to be delays, misconnects and cancellations, seems ill planned. They are already unable to even put your calls into the hold queue much of the time, so I don’t imagine anybody will be getting through to them when this hits. Yesterday, I had to call them because they had somehow, because of a 9 minute schedule change, decided to leave 5 members of my family on the same flights, but to switch my flights to completely different ones. My first call was terminated because the hold queue was too long and they could not put anyone else into it. My second call (2 hours later) was picked up after roughly 75 minutes. This is pretty much the experience that everyone can expect all winter in Canada, so to add this mess to it doesn’t make much sense to me. I have to assume that on the 21st, if there are any problems, our only option will be at the airport and even that may not be of any use. September, October, April, May sure seem like better times to try this experiment.