With Boxing Day bringing nothing but blue skies, passengers waiting to fly out of Moncton International Airport were breathing a sigh of relief on Monday.
“I think if we had of flown out Thursday or Friday, we would have been stuck in the airport for sure,” said Joshua Spike, who was flying back to Ottawa that afternoon.
"It was nice to have a white Christmas, but it was a lot of snow,” added Callie Spike. “But, today it's nice and clear... we're still delayed, but it's only by 30 minutes, so we're hopeful to get off the ground here soon.”
Their experience was much different than many other Maritimers looking to fly around the holidays.
With Christmas always being a busy time at airports, ferocious winter storms across Canada caused travel headaches with delays, cancellations, and for one Cape Breton family, a complete change in holiday plans.
"My family will never fly WestJet again -- they don't understand what we lost,” said Robynne King, who was with a group of 12 planning to go to Orlando, Florida. “I know we lost a trip, but we lost more than a trip. We lost those chances at those memories of a group of 12.”
She says their dream Disney World vacation had to be completely cancelled after the airline overbooked their flight on Dec. 23rd.
"From what we understand, they knew this Orlando flight was going to be put on a smaller plane. The plane sat on the tarmac -- this is what I was told -- for three days prior and it was the plane they were going to use because the bigger plane that we originally booked was in Toronto,” she said.
The large group was told that they no longer had seats available and wouldn’t be able to fly out together.
"They did try to reschedule us, but there was no reasonable solution,” said King. “It was ‘two people get on this flight and four people get on this flight and then there’s layovers and you’re not going to get there until the 28th if you’re lucky.’”
As of Monday, King says they still don’t even have their luggage back and have had no communication with the airline, adding that she really wants some answers, including why her group was chosen to lose their seats.
Although airlines can’t control weather-related changes, experts say that passengers do have rights and it isn’t as simple as just cancelling someone’s flight and moving on.
"We don't expect the airline to pay for passengers’ meals or hotels if it's due to weather that the flight is cancelled. What the airline is required to do is rebook the passenger or buy them a ticket on another airline,” said Air Passengers Rights President, Gabor Lukacs. “That is the law with specific parameters, and if the airline disobeys that law, there has to be consequences, otherwise the law is not worth the paper it's written on."
For King’s specific situation, he adds, "if the flight is oversold, the airline owes you compensation of $2,400 Canadian dollars in cash right at the airport, or within 48 hours after that."
Lukacs says right now the federal government has a backlog of over 30,000 passenger complaints.
“The bottom line is we need to simplify the whole regime to make it very simply and straight forward, which it is not, and we need much bigger, much firmer, much more aggressive enforcement,” he said.
As for King, their Christmas wasn’t completely ruined.
“People knew our story, and being in the small community that we live, everybody was reaching out. When my family arrived home, to our surprise, the community gave my kids Christmas,” said King.
“We’ve tried to turn this situation into as many positives as we can. We went on with what we would normal do. We woke up, Santa came, we had our delicious supper together and now we are visiting family in and around Cape Breton,” she added.
But her kids, along with the rest of the group, are still upset about the lost vacation and the memories that could have been.
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