Blight

Air Canada - Craptastic Service

This Monday, I was up until the wee hours preparing for a business trip. I woke up early, caught a taxi to Toronto's Pearson airport, and after making it through customs (I didn't get asked ANY questions this time... weird) I proceeded down to my gate to wait for my flight.

And so started a 12 hour ordeal that should have been a short 4 hour trip...

The initial indicator of a problem was the fact that we were scheduled to leave at 9:45 am, and yet at 10:15 am we were still sitting in the plane waiting for it to back off from the gate. At 10:30am they tell us that we have to de-plane. Why?

Technical problems. A hydraulic pump of some sort had failed or was broken. As nice as it would have been for them to have found and fixed that a little earlier in the program, I echoed a fellow traveler's sentiments "Good call!" someone declared. No one would have wanted to take off and have that discovered mid-flight, or perhaps mid-crash.

So no, the technical problem and the de-planing are not really the source of my feelings of resentment towards Air Canada and their delightfully craptastic service. No, I don't blame them at all for having to de-plane us. These things happen. Amazing the plane made it in with the wrecked pump though...

On to the rant: So now we get off the plane and are shoo'ed onto a little bus to take us back to the main terminal. When we get there, the one Air Canada employee at the gate is absolutely clueless. She doesn't know we were coming, she doesn't know where we are supposed to go, and she doesn't say anything to the huge crowd (a recently de-planed plane full of people) gathering at the bottom of the bus-loading area for the gate.

People wait, and wait. Finally people start to get pissed off. We're standing around with no idea what we are supposed to do. We just had our flight cancelled (without them telling us that directly) and many people have connecting flights or meetings to attend at the other end of that cancelled flight.

Finally a lady who knows something shows up and leads the train of passengers through tight back corridors and at last we emerge... back where we had originally started our airport adventure: at the terminal entrance.

So now we haven't been told where our bags are, or what Air Canada is going to do for the 50 or 60 of us to get us to our destination. In fact, we've just been rather unceremoniously dropped off at the door and told to fend for ourselves.

Even at the "Executive Check-In" counter (where I am fortunate enough to be able to bypass the incredibly long lines mere mortals use) they feign impotence and tell us to "Go through the double doors, and go to the left... there are some phones there. Pick one up and talk to an agent."

I wander around, get my bags from a lower level, come back up, go through the magical double doors, and head over to a table with a dozen cheap plastic phones. The funny part is the phone books. Yes, they have lots of phone books on this table, and yet the phones have no buttons. They are hard-wired to call Air Canada agents as soon as you pick up the phone. So are these useless decoration? Not really, they serve as an expressive outlet for pissed off patrons. It's impossible to find a phone book that doesn't have its cover ripped off and "AIr CanADa SUcKS!" scribbled on it.

I did make it to St. Louis, 9 hours later than I was supposed to, and 6 hours after my customer meeting was already done. I had to go away from my final destination, fly to New York (JFK), and then transfer to fly back to St. Louis. Of course I should mention that when I arrived at JFK, they had us run to the other end of the terminal, just to tell us that the gate was changed to... wait for it... the exact same gate we just ran all the way FROM.

I won't even waste your time complaining about the Hilton suite I stayed in where the bathtub was clogged with hair, the sink stopper was broken (so it wouldn't empty my tooth-paste-saliva-spittle on its own, and I had to hold the stopper open with my hand), and the TV changed channels on its own.

Nope, because you have better things to do. Like avoid giant sink-holes.

EDIT: (updated link to PDF file... last one disappeared)

Labels: business trip

posted by Blight @ 8:07 PM