The Decibel - Why holiday travel chaos is the new normal

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

The holiday travel period was incredibly tumultuous – with passengers stranded, bags lost and thousands of flights cancelled. The airlines say the winter storms caused unprecedented disruptions, but The Globe’s transportation reporter Eric Atkins says the problems go beyond that.He tells us the other factors that led to this chaos, how airlines are responding, and whether this is likely to happen again. (Spoiler: It is.)Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

The winter holiday travel season was pretty chaotic. Late last week, MPs met in Ottawa to ask airline executives and airport officials what went wrong. Let me begin by apologizing that we failed to deliver to the level that we had expected. We did everything we could to get people moving. Several storms severely impacted our operations across the country. In my 22 years at WestJet, this was the most significant weather-induced disruption that I have experienced. I guess one of the biggest questions that I have is, when is it ever acceptable that we have passengers sitting on aircraft for up to 12 hours,

and in some circumstances over 12 hours. I find it very troubling that you would have booked travel and taken money from Canadians when you didn't have pilots lined up for the flights that you were selling. Eric Atkins is the Globe's transportation reporter. Today, he'll tell us how airlines are responding and whether this is likely to happen again. I'm Anika Raman-Wellms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Eric, thank you so much for talking to me today. My pleasure.

I think we all heard stories over the winter break of people missing flights, being stuck in places. As the transportation reporter, Eric, were you expecting this winter travel season to be such a debacle? I don't think anybody expected it to be this bad. It looked like the winter weather was going to pose challenges and the past summer was awful. So this was the first big test for the airports and the airlines and everybody presumably had staffed up and prepared, but nobody expected it to be like this. So there were a lot of flight cancellations across the board,

but in particular with one carrier, Sunwing. So let's talk about this for a minute. What happened with Sunwing? Sunwing, like all the other airlines, faced heavy snow and cold in its Canadian airports. And when that happens, you lose the ability to move planes and crews between airports. So an airplane that is stuck in Toronto cannot make it to Cancun, and therefore can't make it back to Quebec City to take the people from Quebec City to Cancun. So the whole

schedule gets thrown off and delayed. Sunwing ended up canceling much of its operations at a few airports and then went ahead and canceled all of Saskatchewan until February 3rd in order to catch up. Sunwing's a smaller airline. They don't have the backup that WestJet or Air Canada does. They don't have the spare planes ready. Their CEO said their bid to hire temporary foreign worker pilots was rejected by Ottawa earlier in December. So there were 63 pilots short. They went ahead with their operations, hoping they could reschedule and move crews around. But the winter weather made that even harder. Some of their customers were left at sun destinations for several days without flights home, without hotel accommodations, just a real travel nightmare. And can you expand a little bit on that? Like the people who were stranded in these sun destinations, as we say, like what was their

experience? The biggest problem seems to have been lack of communication from Sunwing. A weather shutdown is one thing, but not hearing from the airline that you paid to complete your vacation is another thing. Passengers complained of having to check out of their hotel every morning, go to the airport to see if their plane was going to be there that day, only to find out it wasn't, and then they'd have to find more accommodation. Remember, this is Christmas at a tropical resort. There aren't extra hotel rooms, typically, nor are there extra airplanes. Sunwing was forced to lease a bunch of planes to try to bring home all the stranded passengers, and that took about a week to recover. What are some of the worst stories you've heard from passengers stuck in this chaos? A lot of them were in really difficult situations here. But what was that like? Well, given the widespread chaos, there's too many to recount here. But, you know, I heard about people who missed Christmas with relatives, spent nights on airport floors,

sleeping, of not hearing from their airline about when a flight was coming. And this comes at Christmas when people make big plans. It's an important time of year. People want to go away. They want to meet family. I heard about family reunions that never happened over Christmas, people who spent Christmas Eve in an airport. Okay, so let's talk about the causes behind all of this chaos for these airlines

and for the passengers who are experiencing the results of this. Why did all of this happen? Well, it started with a few winter storms in Western Canada and Ontario and Quebec earlier on. And, you know, a winter storm is going to ground a plane. It's going to slow an airport down. That means that plane cannot get to its destination and then can't fill in the next slot that it is assigned. Airports and airlines run on networks. So one plane goes back and forth between either the same destination and its hub or, you know, various destinations and its hub.

And when it gets stuck in one place, it can't, you know, the delays and cancellations flow down the line. The same for moving air crews around. They often use airplanes to get from one place to another, and they're only allowed to work so many hours in a day. So if they can't get there, then there could be no crews available in some cases. Okay, so winter storms can cause disruptions. But, I mean, we're in Canada, right? And winter storms in December, January are nothing new. So shouldn't airlines

be used to dealing with them? Winter happens every year, they say. Part of the problem was we had two and a half years of pent up demand for travel. People haven't traveled since before March 2020. They traveled a lot in the summer. It didn't go very well. And they traveled a lot this Christmas as well. The airlines were largely sold out. What that means is they had few backup planes ready to go. They didn't have extra staff in a lot of cases to fill in when things went badly. So there was no slack built into the system. There was no wiggle room, essentially. If something went wrong, there was no wiggle room to figure it out then. Exactly. Nothing to fall back on. We talked in the summer about how airlines were struggling to come back after the pandemic. There

were huge issues in the summer for people who wanted to fly. And a lot of the issues kind of seem to center around staffing problems. So how connected is this situation that happened now to the chaos that we saw in the summers? Is it related? The effect is similar, but the causes are very different. Everybody says that the problems in the summer were due to lack of staffing at the government agencies that work at the airports, that they screen people. The acronyms are CATSA, CBSA, the Border Services Agency. You know, it was two and a half years into the pandemic.

Not everybody was fully staffed yet. And yet a lot of people wanted to travel at the same time there were COVID protocols to administer checks. So everything went slower with fewer people and it went badly. This time, and I had, I began checking, you know, late November, early December, all the government agencies said, we have enough people to do this. The airline said, we have enough people. Air Canada said, we have, I think it was more staff pre-pandemic to run 90% of their schedule. So they're running a smaller schedule with more people. So they were fully staffed.

But I guess I wonder, if you're not adequately staffed in the summer, a few months later, you're fully staffed. This means you're hiring a lot of new people, right? So I don't know, is there kind of a lack of expertise there maybe for the people who are actually working during the holidays? In Vancouver, there are a few planes that spent several hours fully loaded without getting the people off. There was an Air Canada flight, the passengers were kept on board for 11 hours, if you can imagine that. Wow. And the reason was there were no gates available. There were empty planes sitting, occupying all the gates. So this airplane was

forced to idle out on the tarmac because nobody would tow a plane away from a gate. I've heard various things that the snow wasn't plowed to allow the planes to be towed away from the gate. I've heard that it was plowed, but the airlines were not prioritizing clearing the gates. I talked to one professor who said, clearly, the person whose job it is to tow the planes or direct people to tow the planes did not think it could be done in the snow when actually it probably could be done if they knew enough to either get the snow moved or had a skilled operator to tow an empty plane away from a gate to clear it. So these poor people sat on the plane for 11 hours. That's not the only instance of that. We've heard five, six hour waits on the plane. I mean, MPs themselves

were asking at the committee meeting, right? Like, how can an airline keep people on the tarmac in a plane for so many hours? They're at their destination. They just can't get off. Like what was their response to that? I know it's crazy. The, uh, Tamara Vrooman, the head of the Vancouver airport said it was too windy and cold to use so-called air stairs, which are the stairs that you push up to the edge of an airplane. Um, so they couldn't use that. Um, um, I think it's a three-hour limit that passengers are allowed to be held on a parked plane. But again, there's a safety out. When I looked up that regulation, it said if there's a safety reason, they can be held longer. In this case, I can guarantee that the CTA is looking at this instance and the airline is going to face heavy fines if it's found in the wrong in this case.

The CTA has fined airlines before for holding passengers for lengthy periods on a parked plane. We'll be back in a minute. There were a lot of questions at the Transportation Committee meeting in Ottawa last week about airline resiliency, about what measures the airlines had in place in the event of disruptions. What did they say about how prepared they had been for this? All the airlines said they were prepared. They all say we operate in Canada, we operate in cold weather and winter. Winter is not new to us. However, nobody fully explained, I don't think, how this could have happened.

There was some finger pointing, blaming airports for some of their problems and vice versa. And so they said, airline execs said they had prepared. MPs, though, were pushing back, I guess. Can you just give me a sense of that exchange that was happening? Yeah, Sunwing came under particular fire, given how badly their services went. Their CEO, Len Corrado, said, this government rejected our plan to hire 63 temporary foreign worker pilots earlier in December, and therefore we had to scramble to try to meet our schedule. Well, he was then accused of selling tickets on planes that he could not fully staff, which was a pretty strong accusation. And I'm not sure he fully explained his way out of it. Why did the government reject those temporary foreign workers? Well, the government doesn't even acknowledge that an application for temporary foreign workers

has been made. So they just, I ran into a stone wall there. The union that represents Sunwing Pilots, they talked at length with me about it. And they said, there are plenty of candidates in Canada who could have filled those jobs. Although there's a pilot shortage in the US, that's not the case here. There were pilots available in Canada to fly those planes, and they just simply weren't hired. The union said, one reason for this is because Sunwing is in the process of being purchased by WestJet. They want to keep the staff low ahead of the purchase. Wow.

Okay, so that's kind of what went down with Sunwing a little bit there. WestJet and Air Canada execs were also there being questioned by members of parliament. Can you give me a sense of the exchange that was happening there? Well, everybody is apologetic, but I don't think anybody got a clear answer. They just said, hey, it was severe weather, severe weather across the country in places that normally don't get severe weather. We got backed up. Air Canada said it had, I think, about 14 or 15 planes on backup.

They've declined to say to me and to the committee yesterday how many flights they had to cancel. WestJet has been much more forthcoming. I think the number is about 1,400 over the holidays, 1,400 flights canceled, which, you know, finding seats for that many people, it's thousands of people, it's not possible. I mean, I can imagine this is pretty unsatisfactory, especially if you were those that many people, it's thousands of people, it's not possible. I mean, I can imagine this is pretty unsatisfactory, especially if you were someone who was caught up in this chaos over the holidays. Did the airline execs acknowledge that they didn't prepare well enough for this? Nobody actually came out and said that, that we weren't prepared.

They did say it was worse than we expected. Could any changes come from this meeting that happened in Ottawa last week? Like, could we actually see any improvements come as a result of this? Good question. Well, I think people expected the improvements would have happened over Christmas after the summer was so bad. The one big change we might see that the airlines are not going to be happy about is greater fines, perhaps more scrutiny, new regulations governing refunds, cancellations, compensation. Tougher regulations, I think, are coming. And Omar Al-Ghabra, the transportation minister, has said so. And he repeated that before the committee.

What's in place, I guess, what's in place right now, though, in terms of the compensation people can get? You're entitled to a refund if they cancel your plane. They're also supposed to rebook you fairly quickly on their airline or another airline. You're entitled to compensation if the reason for the delay or the cancellation is within the airline's control. There are some loopholes in the cases in which passengers are entitled to compensation. If the airline's responsible for the issue but it's a safety matter, like a broken plane or or in some cases, the airlines have argued that unavailable

cruise becomes a safety issue. Then the airlines could deny your claim for compensation. Canadian Transportation Agency, the regulator that adjudicates these disputes, rejected a bid by one of the airlines to say that unavailable cruise was a safety matter because they said the airlines are responsible for staffing their operations properly. So you said the delay was 18 months to get compensation, Eric? What does that mean for people? It means if you need that money, you're better off, some people say, going to small claims court.

It also means the system is broken. The airlines lobbied for a system that would make it difficult to get your compensation. And here we are. There's no reason the airlines or somebody can't build a website where you click a button. My flight was canceled. Here's my delay. Click, click. I'm applying for compensation. Click. Instead, you have to write letters. You have to wait for 30 days for a

response from the airline. And if you're unsatisfied with that response, then you go to the CTA and you get in this massive queue. Wow. So it sounds like, I mean, compensation is incredibly hard to get, it sounds like, or at least there's a whole process to go through, at least in Canada. Is there any part of the world that does it a little bit differently and makes it easier for passengers to get that compensation? In Europe, it's easier to get compensation in some cases, because they only have two categories of flight cancellations, ordinary disruptions that could have been avoided, and extraordinary disruptions, defective planes or terrorist attacks. So the rules are clearer there.

And the head of the Canadian Transportation Agency told politicians she would like more clarity in Canada on the rules. Interesting. So, Eric, I'm wondering about how things are looking now at the airports. Like, if someone's headed to fly somewhere tomorrow, going to the airport, are things more or less back to normal? Things are probably going to be fine because there's no cure for congestion and back to work, back to school. You know, it still snows. It snowed here in Toronto, so I'm sure that slowed things down a little bit, but I'm sure it's manageable

simply because the passenger volumes are lower. The big test is coming in the March break. And what do you think we're in for as flight travel ramps back up for March break? I don't know. A lot of scrutiny. I think a lot of people are going to, you know, they're going to go away again because that's what people like to do. But it's going to be a big test because we're going to have high volumes of passengers. We're going to have winter and tight timelines. You know, people going to places that there aren't regular flights like the Caribbean and Mexico. If an airline only flies there once a week and that flight is canceled. You know, the margin for error is very small. So if nothing changes, what does that mean for the rest of the year when it

comes to people who want to fly and travel? Well, airline tickets went up in price by about 15% last summer. They're certainly not going to come down this coming summer. They may go up again. And a big reason for that is the airlines are posting smaller schedules than pre-pandemic levels. At most airlines, the preliminary schedules show about 90% of pre-pandemic schedules, which means capacity will be tight. There'll be fewer tickets available, greater demand for those seats. So they're flying less planes, but those planes are going to be fuller essentially then. Fuller planes, yeah. And higher ticket prices, also less resiliency when things go wrong. They'll have fewer backup planes because they'll be staffed. Why would they do that? Well, part of the reason is to keep demand

high, get the most out of the resources. They'll run a leaner operation. Most of them are still losing money. There are only two publicly traded airlines in Canada, Transat and Air Canada. All the airlines have posted deep losses in the pandemic. Eric, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. Thanks very much. That's it for today I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms our producers are Madeline White

Cheryl Sutherland and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin David Crosby edits the show Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow