Air Canada is once again targeted by passenger discontent, while four actresses on a North Coast tour have been denied access to their return flight.
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Almost a week later, actress Louise DesChâtelets doesn’t answer when she talks about her experience.
“I’ve never experienced a situation like this before. The service, language and tone of the two Air Canada flight attendants were appalling. I wept before them; that tells you everything »
Free spots
The day after the presentation of the play Huit Femmes at the Jean Marc Dion Performance Hall in Sept-Îles, the cast was scheduled to return to Montreal on Friday (September 16) on Air Canada. However, only three of the seven actresses get their boarding pass at the airport.
“We had our tickets in hand. They had been paid. But for some reason our names weren’t in their system. Instead of trying to fix things, the flight attendants simply refused us boarding, claiming that we must have been the victim of a scam and that the plane was full anyway. »
However, everything indicates that this was not the case. Photographs taken by his colleagues on board indicate that flight AC-7989, seating about fifty, departed Sept-Îles for Montreal with four empty seats. She believes these seats in all likelihood left behind her and those of her three acolytes (Sonia Vigneault, Pascale Desrochers, and Marie-Andrée Lemieux).
New tickets for $948.69
Finally, the actresses manage to leave almost 10 hours later on the next flight by purchasing new tickets at the astronomical cost of $948.69 each (tax included) one-way, which are on sale at the moment from the Vasco agency in Sept -Îles to be taken over.
“A price like that for a shitty service makes no sense,” comments the actress and courier of the Journal. Air Canada benefits from the world. »
For her part, the CEO of the affected travel agency, Danielle Giasson, is trying to calm the situation and refuses to blame Air Canada.
“There was a computer glitch, maybe questionable customer service, the Telus cellular network crashed… It’s a series of problems that arose that day. The actresses were unlucky and we are unlucky. But what they experienced here, she continues, could have happened to them at Dorval Airport. »
Current currency in the region
Maybe. Still, a few calls from within the community have allowed us to recognize that few people in the area will be surprised by the experiences the actresses lived through that day. Mirka Boudreau, CEO of Int-elle Corporation, a project management company of all kinds in Sept-Îles, is formal: “What they suffered is commonplace here”.
The latter even estimates that these repeated flight delays or cancellations have caused him more than $100,000 in expenses of all kinds (hotels, salaries, etc.) in the last three months. It also estimates that it has lost more than $1 million in contracts simply because it was unable to travel at the right time for business trips due to Air Canada’s service outages.
investigation started
Earlier this week, Louise DesChâtelets wrote to Air Canada headquarters to complain, among other things, about the services the two Air Canada employees had received that day.
Air Canada’s public relations department confirmed via email that they are currently reviewing the circumstances of this file.
However, it is specified that the four actresses’ reservations “were made with a third party” and that, at this stage of their examination, their files show “that in their case no confirmation was sent to them for this flight”.
“As a result, Sept-Îles airport staff were unable to issue boarding passes,” the Air Canada spokesman concludes.
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