WestJet flight cancellation costs family thousands

A Calgary family almost had their summer vacation cancelled because WestJet suddenly cancelled their flight.

Ali Moshiri had planned a special getaway to California with his wife and children, where they would enjoy theme parks like Legoland and the San Diego Zoo.

He had booked his flight with WestJet months in advance for Monday, July 1. The days leading up to their departure were stressful for Moshiri because of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA) strike.

AMFA’s surprise decision to go on strike starting Friday evening, June 28, forced WestJet to abruptly cancel 150 flights at the start of the busy Canada Day long weekend. The cancellations impacted 20,000 passengers.

Moshiri anxiously followed the news on the night of June 30 into the early hours of Monday, waiting to see if their flight would be affected.

“I couldn’t even sleep because I thought that if they canceled the concert, it would happen around midnight,” he said by phone.

The father of two said he received an email from the carrier around 1 a.m. informing passengers that the strike was over.

The union representing WestJet aircraft maintenance engineers effectively ended its strike at 1:30 a.m. ET on July 1.

An hour after Moshiri received the email informing him that the strike was over, he said he received another one warning them that their flight later that morning had been cancelled.

AMFA has been ordered to begin work immediately to fully restore services. However, given the extremely disruptive nature of the strike, the airline said it would take some time and further disruption over the coming week to get aircraft and crew back in position.

Moshiri said the carrier gave him several options in the flight cancellation email. He could either cancel his trip entirely, request a refund, or get rebooked on a flight to San Diego on July 6, the day he was scheduled to fly home.

“They offered me a flight to San Diego that day and back,” he said with a laugh. “So I just declined.”

In an emailed statement, a WestJet spokesperson confirmed that while the Moshiri flight took place after the strike ended, the cancellation was still due to the labour disruption.

“We sincerely apologize to Mr. Moshiri and his family for the inconvenience they experienced during their travel from Calgary to San Diego,” the spokesperson said.

“Unfortunately, as the July long weekend was a peak travel period in Canada, availability was limited within our network and with other carriers, making replenishment options extremely difficult.”

Eight hours of driving and more than $6,000 later

Moshiri was willing to do anything to get his children to their appointment with Legoland.

After weighing the pros and cons, he searched online to see if it was worth calling WestJet to resolve their issue. Moshiri said most people online said they couldn’t get through to an agent, so he decided it wasn’t worth the wait.

He looked for other flights from Canada, but all the flights were full, so he decided to look for the nearest city in the United States with an airport that had flights to San Diego.

Moshiri eventually booked a Delta flight for Tuesday, July 2, from Bozeman, Montana, to San Diego, with a stopover in Salt Lake City.

He remembers being unable to sleep, likely because of the adrenaline coursing through his veins as he tried to book flights, hotels, rental cars and tickets to attractions. So they left around 6 a.m. Monday and drove eight hours to Bozeman.

They spent the night in a hotel, and once there, Moshiri booked their return flight from San Diego to Seattle and back to Bozeman, where they parked their car at the airport.

Fortunately, everything went well once we arrived in California.

“If I had canceled (the trip), I would have had to tell my kids that San Diego was canceled, Legoland was canceled, and they would have had to stay home for a week,” he said. “I didn’t want to do that, so I told them we were going to change the plan, and they were still happy, but it was a long drive.”

Moshiri was pleased with his solution, but it cost him a pretty penny.

He says changing their last-minute U.S. reservations due to WestJet’s cancellation cost them more than $6,000 — and that doesn’t include additional hotels and parking fees.

Plus, he didn’t want to risk booking a direct flight back to Calgary with WestJet if there were more cancellations, so they still had to return to Bozeman and drive another eight hours home.

WestJet’s “poor communication”

A few weeks after returning from their trip, Moshiri submitted requests for reimbursement and compensation.

A frequent traveller due to his job, he has been a WestJet Platinum member for years and is familiar with the airline’s refund and reimbursement processes.

Moshiri says he usually gets an email from WestJet confirming they’ve received the request and are processing it, but this time there was radio silence.

What made it even more frustrating was that it took him two hours to submit a reimbursement request because he had a lot of receipts to submit and had to resize the PDFs so the form would accept them.

He finally called WestJet a few weeks after submitting his claims. Moshiri says a customer service agent helped him get a refund for his plane tickets, but the airline didn’t follow through on his request. So he submitted another claim after a few weeks without hearing back from the airline.

During the last week of August, he called WestJet again, and they finally confirmed that they had received his refund request.

“Eventually, after that conversation, I got an email saying, ‘We received your refund request, but we’re too busy and still processing a lot of cases, so we’ll process your case at some point,’” Moshiri recalls.

That was the last he heard from the carrier.

In response, WestJet said it processes all claims in the order they are received.

“WestJet is required to respond to claims under the Air Passenger Protection Regulations received within 30 days. Mr. Moshiri submitted his claim under the Air Passenger Protection Regulations on September 5, 2024,” a spokesperson said.

However, according to the APPR website, you must request a refund directly from the airline and can only file claims with APPR.

WestJet did not specifically respond to a question asking why Moshiri has not received an update on his refund request.

Air passenger rights advocate Gabor Lukacs says the airline “has failed to meet its legal obligations to passengers under the APPR.”

He cited Article 18 of the APPR, which states that if the cancellation is beyond the control of the airline, carriers are required to rebook customers on competing airlines if they cannot rebook them on their own flights or on partner flights departing within 48 hours.

“WestJet is liable for the passenger’s expenses in this case, even though the cancellation was beyond the carrier’s control because it failed to meet its rebooking obligations,” Lukacs said.

Moshiri says he has never had a single issue with WestJet since he started flying with them regularly in 2016. This cancellation was the first major incident he has experienced.

“I think they had a lot of trouble dealing with this situation, but they decided not to take responsibility for it,” he said. “I think their mistake was miscommunication with customers.”

He also found it odd to continue receiving promotional emails from the carrier, but no communication regarding the cancellation.

In the end, Moshiri says he’s not upset about what happened because he got them to their destination.

He added that while he was not happy, as a frequent traveller there was nothing else he could do because WestJet is one of the few airlines in Canada.

“There is no competition… I have no choice.”

With files from Kenneth Chan