The strike by WestJet flight attendants may have been short-lived, but tens of thousands of passengers are still impacted after hundreds of flights were cancelled over the weekend. Salvador Banawis was supposed to fly to Cancún from Winnipeg with his family for a wedding on Sunday. Their flights were rebooked two days later and on Tuesday morning, their new route included a flight from Winnipeg to Ottawa, then a taxi to Montreal where they’ll have to spend the night in a hotel before catching a flight to Cancún on Wednesday morning — the same day as the wedding. “Five hours waiting for their confirmation, the call gets disconnected, so it happened to us like three times,” he said about trying to reach WestJet to sort out their travel plans after their initial flights were cancelled. Thousands of flight attendants walked off the job on Sunday but are now returning to work after a tentative agreement was reached on Monday. “We already lost three days there at Cancún, so we extended our stay,” Banawis said. The airline provided the family with taxi vouchers to pay for the roughly two-hour drive to Montreal. Banawis said they’re taking the journey one step at a time. “[We’ll figure] out how we’ll be compensated for the other things that we’re going to be taking out of our pocket,” he said. Heather Jowett’s flight from Ottawa to Calgary left on schedule Tuesday after it was initially cancelled. She said she didn’t receive any communications from the airline. “We were just waiting to see what they were going to do with the flight, and they ended up running it as normal once they settled and so, we didn’t have to worry about anything, but we didn’t hear from them about what would happen with our flight,” Jowett said. Fellow traveller Larry Klopoushak said his flight on Tuesday wasn’t impacted. “We were concerned over the weekend when we heard all of the disruptions and so on. But this was our scheduled date to fly, and we came here. Everything was normal, check in was fine and we’re on our way.” The deal still has to be ratified. WestJet said it has ramped up operations, but it’s not clear when service levels will return to normal.
