Honestly, I should turn this into a regular column, due to the frequency of my rants against Air Canada on this blog. But they just keep on asking for it.
My flight home from New York today was delayed by 3-1/2 hours. That’s for a flight that only takes an hour. The vague description of the cause was something to do with “equipment delays”. The airline kept us waiting in the terminal all that time without offering us so much as a free soda.
Then I got home and saw this:
Air Canada’s efforts to burnish its public image were dealt a blow Sunday when the carrier was forced to cancel some flights because its pilots reached the limit on their flying time for the month.
Oh. So that’s what they mean by “equipment delays”.
Air Canada’s advertisements feature all sorts of promises of fun stuff that’s “coming soon”, like personal entertainment sets on all seats. A word of advice to the management team at Air Canada: the main thing passengers want to be “coming soon” is their flight. You might want to spend a bit less money and effort focusing on useless nonsense, and a bit more on basics like, oh, say, customer service. Just a thought.
Why didn’t you simply fly an alternate airline? You KNEW AC was gonna screw up somehow…
My family and I flew AC between Chicago and Montreal this spring. On the flight to Montreal, there were about 30 passengers on a 150 seat plane. On the way home, same plane, 9 passengers. We had our own private flight attendant. This made for a very pleasant trip, but obviously was not very profitable for the airline.
I haven’t flown on a U.S. carrier flight that wasn’t jammed to the gills in several years. Was my AC experience unusual, or is it still regularly flying with less-than-full planes?
I’ll never forget the time an A.C. stewardess came and grabbed my seafood snack sandwich right our of my hands….after I,d already taken several bites of it.
I was flying economy, you see, and the seafood snack-on-a-croissant was reserved for business passengers, and I’d been given one by mistake
Has anyone posting here ever been served a seafood snack sandwich, while travelling business class on A.C., that had three bites taken out of it?
If so, could I please have it back?
I always wondered about that . . . It still tasted pretty good, though.
So, what, she rewrapped it and gave it to a 1st class passenger?! OMG!
I’m telling you all the truth! She came on the P.A. systeme and screeched: “will the passanger in economy who got the seafood snack by mistake please raise their hand”.
I suddenly realised that I was eating beyond my means!
I put my hand aloft (where else can ya put it when you’re flying at 40,000 feet!) and the stewardess came
dashing down the aisle and practically grabbed the sandwich right outta my mouth!
Talk about service, eh! No doubt the flight attendant was a graduate of the “aeroflot” school of customer relations!
Which gets me to thinking! Air Canada, in a drive to win customers back, should start a new ad campaign touting the following slogan: “We taught Aeroflot”!!
Reminds me of a charter flight (a now deservedly defunct airline) a few years ago in which two stews got into a non-physical bitch fight, and after going their separate ways, the one in our section continued to mouth off about the other one for at least a further 1/2 hour. A real pleasant flight.