Hello, MAJOR safety concern and PR nightmare!
If you fly on a regular basis, you probably know that each commercial flight has a manifest, or a list, of its passengers on board. So when you check in, they know chances are good that you plan to be there, and when they scan your boarding pass before you get on the plane, they know for sure that you’re there.
So now imagine having reservations for a multi-leg flight to a few European countries and then a flight back to your home country. You bought all this as a round-trip ticket.
You make it from your home airport to, let’s say, Germany and then Hungary, with no problem. But when you get to the airport in Budapest to go home, the agent tells you that you don’t have your ticket home anymore. You’re not on their manifest. They say you were a “no show” on your leg from Munich to Berlin, and therefore cancelled your flight home.
Siok Har Lim’s Story
This is exactly what happened to a woman named Siok Har Lim, a resident of Montreal, when she tried to go home on her Air Canada flight.
According to the CBC, her flights through Germany and Hungary occurred without incident. But when she arrived at Budapest Airport, Lim discovered that Air Canada had cancelled her flight home. An agent for the airline explained that because Lim hadn’t showed up for her Munich to Berlin flight days earlier, the airline considered her to be a “no show.”
The thing is, Lim was on the flight in question.
“I don’t understand why Air Canada is saying what they’re saying,” Lim told the CBC. “Because I actually did board that flight.”
Lim, whose experience was made worse because she speaks very little English – her niece translated for her – still had to get home, of course. So she paid $2,550 CAN ($1,785 US) for a new flight home. And as a senior citizen on a limited income, that was a dear price to pay.
When she got back home to Montreal, she tried to get Air Canada to compensate her. They told her she should try to get payment from Swiss Air (they were the operating airline for the Air Canada flight from Budapest). But they also offered her a $100 coupon as a “goodwill gesture.”
Lim had used a travel agent for this trip, so she reached out to them. The travel agent had plenty of proof that her client had actually been on her flight – they submitted a copy of her boarding pass and also offered taxi receipts from the Berlin airport to her hotel, the bill from her hotel in Berlin, and even photos of Lim posing in front of Berlin landmarks – but Air Canada still insisted she was a “no show” and didn’t fly with them from Munich to Berlin.
Not the Only One
Unfortunately, Lim isn’t the only person who Air Canada deemed “no shows” when they actually were on their flight:
- Garth Jackson took an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Tampa this past September. He even took a selfie while on the plane. But the airline insisted they had no record of him being on that flight, so they canceled his return flight from Tampa to Toronto.
- Dejan Ratkov submitted boarding passes, luggage tags and a selfie of him and his family on the plane that Air Canada says they missed. in March 2022. He had to pay $2,000 CAN ($1,400 US) to get his family home from Banff to Toronto.
- Christopher Baily had the same issue, as well. Air Canada insisted he “no showed” for his Montreal-St. John’s flight in October, 2023 so they cancelled his flight home. That meant he had to pay $1,070 CAN ($749 US) to get home. He decided to take the airline to court, but when the airline offered to settle, he refused, since he was also suing for $8,500 in general damages due to stress (atta boy!). When the judge saw that Baily offered, not only his boarding pass, but HIS RECEIPT FROM THE BEVERAGES HE ORDERED ON THE FLIGHT that Air Canada says he wasn’t on, he ruled in Baily’s favor.
“It is difficult to think of any other proof that a person could have provided,” wrote the judge “And yet Air Canada continued to take the position, through its refusal of a refund, that [Bailey] had not been a passenger.”
How Does This Even Happen?
According to Air Canada, it’s a mixture of things. Mainly human error and/or technological malfunction.
A representative for the airline said that there were no safety issues because, “passengers went through airport security and had to validate their identification at the gate prior to boarding.” But upon the CBC’s questioning, he didn’t really answer the part about “in the event of an emergency, shouldn’t they know how many people are on a flight?”
Wonderful.
The Follow-Up
A spokesperson for the airline says they are, “reaching out to these customers to apologize” and “rectify the situation.”
As for the future, the spokesperson said these events are extremely rare but they’re working to “mitigate such events” and make their customer service in these matter, well, better.
Meanwhile, “A spokesperson for Transport Canada (their equivalent of the FAA and a few other US federal departments) said the regulatory body takes seriously any incident that could affect “safety and security” and that it will investigate if there has been “non-compliance.”
Siok Har Lim has yet to be fully reimbursed for the ticket she had to buy to get home.
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