Dave’s Personal Blog

Last night I was traveling home from my client in Philadelphia. We left Philly delayed by about 45 minutes, nothing too unusual. We get close to Toronto (where I had a connection on to Halifax) and find that there’s still a massive thunder storm over the city. The airport has closed due to the weather so we redirect to Rochester NY to sit out the storm. Air Canada doesn’t have a presence there so all we could to is sit in the plane.. for several hours before continuing on to Toronto. Again.. weather happens.

The thing that has me and many other travelers steamed is what faced us in Toronto. (aside: the airport in Toronto is in a state of flux… domestic and international flights are handled by the new terminal while US flights are still handled in the old terminal.. they use a shuttle bus to move passengers between the two) By the time we got in, the shuttle service wasn’t running… so it wasn’t as easy to get the to domestic terminal. Once there I find that the support staff had gone home for the night.. leaving several hundred passengers to try to get through to the customer service line on a special bank of phones or via a toll free #.

I was just about to the phones when we were told to go to another area where some agents were starting the day. That line much have had 400 people in it at one point. No broadcast announcements were made informing people what was going on, where they should be, or anything about what the process was.

People were given directions, and shuffled about with very poor instructions/information and no explanation of what was trying to be accomplished.

In all we we herded like so many cattle. The worst though was that there was nobody there to deal with the situation. The shift finished and everyone went home. What kind of customer service is that?

Air Canada clearly doesn’t seem to have a policy in place for proactively dealing with situation like this (a mass of customers missing connections due to delays and/or cancelations). IMO they would gain in terms of customer satisfaction what it would cost to keep customer service staffed for as long as required in these situations.

I am happy to report, however, that When I eventually did get to talk to an agent (after 4 hours of standing in lines) I got a seat on the first flight out in the morning. So I’m only 10 hours late getting home. I’m writing this sitting at the gate waiting for my flight.. which is sitting just outside the window.. and assumedly will leave on time. I’ve been awake for over 24 hours, I’m tired, my feet hurt, and I smell funny… but so do a good number of people around here this morning… so that’s not worrying me. I will consider carefully before traveling Air Canada again.. or connecting through Toronto.