gcashin

Even if you can ask for more than one wipe, dispensing individual wipes out of Lysol wipes type container is an inferior offer to AC's clean care kits.

Individual lysol wipes < AC clean care kit (which includes hand sanitizer, wipes, mask, gloves, and water bottle).

cirrusdragoon

Eye roll. . . . . pleassse madamme....
Westjet is smart not to waste their resources on such frivolous environmentally wasteful things for economy cabin. The point is to keep their costs at a minimum during this crisis. Everyone has to have their own mask by now when going to the airport, so what is the point of redundantly issuing this? Less plastic waste is better, I can bring my own hand sanitizer , refillable water bottle.

gcashin

This is by far the least significant of the 4 areas I'd mentioned where WS is falling further behind AC. Yes, AC's clean care kit may be duplicative in some ways, but normal stuff isn't always available. I bring a refillable water bottle too, but some airports have stupidly covered up even their touch-free water bottle refill stations (YVR), so water bottle refills post-security are not practical.

Yes, all airlines need to be smart about where they spend $, but the customer experience on WS has degraded significantly. The more important dimensions in my view are WS's atrocious call center wait times, lack of flexibility to change from a full flight to a less full flight, and terrible IT (very difficult to preview seatmap).

cirrusdragoon

Well these are atrocious times. I myself do not judge any company for an inferior product or service offering during this perilous time . Yes some organizations fare better than others in flexibility , however that is always an added cost to the company. The ability to switch to less full flights most likely is a key factor in the scheduling irregularities when they have to cancel a flight. So they are most likely trying to mitigate having to cancel. As I have stated before, i fully acknowledge WS for trying to keep their costs down in order for there to be a WS in the years to come . I have adjusted my expectations. Good for me yay .

I for one love the WJ app, very intuitive , clean and modern.









The new airport maps feature is an excellent add that was missing. I truly enjoy having that information there for reference.







I especially love how easy it is to see the seat selection




I do not understand how you find this difficult?

gcashin

You love how easy it is to preview seats on WS? On the WS app, you need to do a dummy booking and enter passenger info BEFORE it lets you preview the seats. Perhaps you could check out the United app if you'd like to see an app that makes it easy to preview seats. You can actually see the seats before selecting the flights and inputting the passenger info! The WS app takes many more steps than more functional airline apps to preview seats.

Ever tried to do a same day change on the WS app? If it works for you, you may want to buy a lottery ticket.

WS app looks nice, but has fallen behind its competitors in many features like previewing seats, same day changes, etc.

cirrusdragoon

With the seat preview function, what difference does it truly make if you see it before inputting the passenger details or after? After all a 787 or a 737 seat map is consistent with each airlines fleet.

If your goal is to decipher how full a flight is , then this function will only grant you some resolve a few hours before departure. Seat assignments , as you know, are not free in many cases , and even if seat assignments are free, there are some passengers who simply do not or cannot select one during the booking process. This means that the seat map can be highly misleading, especially in the days and weeks leading up to your flight. The seat map is only more accurate once check in for any given flight opens. It is an illusion of optimization.

If you want a more accurate tool , call the airline and ask . They will not give you an exact number but they can give you an approximation.

You can also pay and utilize Expertflyer , it is one of the absolute best ways to help determine how full your flight is. There is no foolproof way to know exactly how full your flight will be. Airlines do not want to compromise that confidential information obviously for competitive reasons.

It is no wonder British Airways, Lufthansa and Klm/Air France have excluded having the seat map available before inputting passenger details.

There will always be , at any given time, advantages and disadvantages to each organizations IT solutions and/or customer experiences.

The bigger picture is the overall trend . From its inception Westjet has proven itself a formidable growing , evolving and improving airline , not just a stagnant one.

We do not know what their plans are for the IT solutions department for all we know they were in fact planning to launch new site/app features this year and due to the pandemic , they have had to cut back on finalizing those plans for now. Or perhaps they are in the process of fine tuning new features. Regardless , I have faith in the airline that in good time they will further their product when fiscally able to.

Comparing to a legacy carrier such as Air Canada or United is a bit of an unfair comparison considering the many more years those airlines have had to research , develop and fine tune their products. The legacies also have had plentiful more financial resources.

In the short time that Westjet has been alive , it is quite remarkable with what they provide , considering the amount of resources they have had to make due with.

I suppose everyone , every traveller will have a different set of expectations , so I will not fault you for your views. Patience is in the mind of the beholder and it seems you do have a choice in airlines .

Sopwith

The difference is that I always look at the seat map before making a booking to make sure there is a seat available to my liking. If not I will book another flight, and even on another airline if I have to to get an aisle seat, and hopefully an exit row seat on a long flight. On WS, having to make a dummy booking to see the seat map is a royal PITA!!!

gcashin

Yes, as Sopwith mentioned, it matters. I can see a generic seatmap anywhere, but I'll always check the seatmap BEFORE deciding to book a flight to see if a desirable seat is available.

I'm well aware of how flights loads and seatmaps work and the limitations of these tools. However, if you look at them within the checkin window (e.g. T-12 hrs) and see an almost completely full seatmap, that's a pretty good indication it's a fairly full flight and you'll have someone sitting next to you. And if you look at another flight and there's only 20 seats selected at T-6 hours, there's a pretty good chance it's going to be fairly empty unless there's an army of standbys, an IRROP, or 100+ customers who haven't done OLCI before the seatmap goes to airport control. And yes, I've had an ExpertFlyer subscription for many years so am familiar with this.


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My observations are that other airlines have been making progress quicker that WS on IT related items.

Airline apps have been a mainstream IT airline function for what, 10 years or so? WS is 26 years old. I don't see how their age gives them a disadvantage on app development. If anything, the lack of legacy mainframe systems should make it easier.

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I've flown WS on and off for 15 years, and it's been my primary airline at times. I agree with the original poster that WS is failing their customers as of late and I feel like WS has gone backwards while other airlines have improved. But this opinion seems to have summoned an army of WS apologists. WS has definitely become a secondary choice for me given their continued devaluation, poor FF program, inflexible same day change policy, and lackluster IT.
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tcook052

Curious as to whether Clifford will share with us why they continued to book WS after making this statement in Nov., 2019? Convenience of a NS between YEG & PHX? Elite perks? WJ Rewards? Low fares? All of the above?

I don't mean to discount the frustration they feel after their latest interactions with WS, just trying to understand why the continue to deal with an airline who has lost their loyalty on more than one occasion.

cirrusdragoon

Ahh but with age ...there is budget. Unless of course one lives carelessly without any regard for fiscal responsibility.

Airlines were and are at different stages of revenue growth, with differing priorities as mandated by their boards. Age is relevant, much like the financial well being of a 45 year old compared to an 18 year old. Board approved budgets are always focussed on the most pressing matters of the time.

Westjet was a low cost airline for the majority of the time of its early existence focusing on building its route network and customer base. Their method of growth was always governed by a measured and cautious , at many times, very prudent board of directors. Slow and steady. A strategy not everyone would agree with but it is in fact what has kept it from the countless list of airlines failures around the world. IT was clearly not the most pressing matter for Westjet during the early mid 2000’s, with a budget focussed growing its domestic / trans border market share amongst other elementary building blocks.

Air Canada , an 84 old enterprise has had the luxury of going from a crown corporation , going through bankruptcy protection , and mergers. They built a vast and mature route network that cost countless of dollars to expand over decades . The revenue streams from its larger network presence alone allows Air Canada and any legacy airline to far surpass Westjet. So yes age is relevant to the financial capability of any organization.

aerobod

Actually the WS IT is more advanced than many airlines, just not in the consumer facing areas, in general due to the need to use IT as a cost efficiency tool more than service differentiator. This may change in time. I’ve worked in both WS and AC IT and worked with peers in Delta, British Airways, Lufthansa, JetBlue and KLM and networked with IT people in dozens of other airlines. A typical airline has about 1500 significant applications, of which only a few dozen are passenger facing. WS has focused on areas such as RNP (optimized aircraft flight paths), database consolidation (cost efficient operation and data integrity), software defined cloud datacentres (flexible and cost efficient operation) and microservices for built back-end applications.

If you look at their IT cost model, they match legacy airlines for equivalent back-end IT services, but at closer to 3% of gross revenue compared with 5% in the legacy airlines and 2% for ULCCs that have much simpler systems and far less applications. The internal focus has been to keep IT costs significantly lower per unit than AC, but have better OTP driven by integrated analytics. The current AC CIO is ex-WS and would like to advance in many areas orientated around back-end service efficiency and consistent integration, as she knows what has been done at WS.

They may decide to invest more in the customer facing applications as they continue to move towards a full-service model from an LCC one, but that will need to be reflected in higher IT costs rolled back into the cost model and higher portion of the ticket costs. This will require a strong business case to show the ROI based on cost efficiency increases or the guest sales increase from increased satisfaction (bearing in mind sales increases need to be about 10 times cost decreases to have similar effect on profit).

Just one indication of order of magnitude, airlines such as Delta and United have about 20 times the budget for customer facing apps, compared with WestJet.

MillennialMiles

WS cancelled my flight and rebooked me on one 5 hrs later. Called in after a 2hr wait and said I couldnt be rebooked on the earlier one because of the fare I bought? Talk about W.T..F. Will prob cancel the ticket at this point and rebook on AC. Going forward will only book on AC since they allow SDC regardless of fare bought. But man, these are the folks that want to snag AC Business travellers to them...they have a LOT to work on.

PointWeasel

I beg to differ in my recent experience.

The recent refund emails and follow-up with the contact centre are a mess.

I have received a half dozen 'now eligible refund' emails from Westjet that do refer to the PNR and offer a link to fill in the refund request information all over again. That part requires entering details that they already have readily available in the system, but no matter. Complete the form for over two dozen bookings cancelled by Westjet starting from late March to this week (Westjet cancelled all flights, not the passengers).

This morning I receive an email stating that the refund had been approved and that the funds had been removed from the Travel Bank and a call would be required to confirm the credit card used for the original booking. However, no name, no PNR, no flight details, no Westjet Rewards number and no ticket number. I call the Westjet Support Desk and the call took over 2 hours to complete as we have to guess which booking it was by going thru every single Westjet Rewards account. The agent was embarrassed and called her supervisors twice to clarify which this process was so difficult and then...when we get to the refund stage there is yet another snag because the outbound flight was flown and the inbound changed twice. The system wants to refund $100 and it should be closer to $600.

Thankfully the agent was pleasant, but if this happens with every refund email sent out missing any detail, then I can only imagine how long the hold times will be in the coming weeks.

I do give kudos for WS pushing through full refunds for flights they cancelled, whereas AC is still dragging their feet, but they need to do better.

To the OP, flexibility is key when flying these days and as I have posted in the AC forum, I had a upcoming flight cancelled within 16 days of departure YYC-PVR-YYC) and a client had their WS flights cancelled and pushed back three times within three weeks of departure (YYC-ZIH-YYC). If you cannot be flexible, then its best to hunker down at home.

aerobod

I would have to know what the flow of the booking was but the WS reservation system is a Sabre cloud service, you would probably end up with a similar experience with any airline using Sabre or Amadeus as the reservation systems haven’t been automated to deal with such large volumes of flight changes and unwinding of the data flows, hence manual and error prone processes via over worked call centre agents without the automation they would normally use.

It depends on whether the reservation system service suppliers see another event similar Covid as to whether they will invest in better automation for the massive amount of changes that happen on a daily basis with current industry instability.

Reservation systems and customer facing apps are only a small fraction of the IT systems that airlines use, without working in an airline IT department, it is difficult for those outside the industry to comprehend the full footprint.

Sopwith

Fair enough. But when you’re the customer they’re the only ones that matter.