Another B.C. couple says they were listed as no-shows by an airline after being denied the ability to board their flight, in a trend that an airline passenger rights advocate calls “very troubling.”
Vernon retirees Les and Sharon Noble reached out to the Times Colonist after reading this week’s story of a Saanichton family who were listed as no-shows for their flight, after being denied boarding of their flight home from Honolulu.
Last year, the Nobles booked a flight through Dutch airline KLM to visit friends in Amsterdam and take a cruise. Since KLM doesn’t fly to Kelowna, their partner airline WestJet was responsible for transporting the couple on the Kelowna-Vancouver leg of the trip. The Nobles would then transfer to KLM’s Vancouver-Amsterdam route.
At least that was the plan.
The day before the flight, Sharon Noble said she tried several times to check in online, but kept receiving a “check-in is not available at this time, try again later” message, despite having followed the link from the email inviting her to check in.
When she called KLM, the representative on the phone acknowledged their reservation but couldn’t figure out why their online check-in wasn’t working, and advised them to show up to the airport early and check in in person.
When they arrived at the WestJet desk in Kelowna the next day, however, WestJet’s representative was also unable to check them in, due to what Noble described as an apparent technical error.
Under the WestJet agent’s direction, Noble called KLM, which redirected her back to WestJet.
At one point, Noble said she attempted to hand her phone, with the KLM representative on the line, to the WestJet representative at the desk, but both representatives said they weren’t authorized to speak to each other.
The Nobles ultimately spent two hours standing at the check-in desk in the Kelowna airport, going back and forth with a KLM representative on the phone and the WestJet representative in person, but neither airline provided a solution.
Eventually, their flight left without them.
Unwilling to miss their trip with pre-booked hotels and friends meeting them, the Nobles were forced to buy new last-minute tickets to Amsterdam, through WestJet, for just over $5,000.
In the months since the couple’s experience with KLM, Sharon said she’s made numerous attempts to get compensation from KLM, as the original airline they’d booked with.
“If it was $500, my time is worth more than that, my god I’ve spent hours on this,” Noble said. “But not $5,000. No, $5,000 is a lot.”
She said that while KLM has been apologetic, the company said that in order to process the claim, it required “a certificate from WestJet indicating the reason they couldn’t check us in.”
Several attempts to get a certificate from WestJet resulted in monthly updates informing them that they were in a queue. Then about two weeks ago, Noble said she received an email from WestJet indicating the airline couldn’t process their claim because WestJet’s records indicated the couple were no-shows.
In that email, which the Times Colonist has viewed, the WestJet representative wrote: “We hope you can appreciate that we must rely on the guests to advise us if they decide to no longer travel.”
Since WestJet’s records indicate that the Nobles didn’t show up, there would be no offer of compensation.
After months of attempting to get their money back from the airlines, the Nobles filed a case in B.C. small claims court against both KLM and WestJet.
Gábor Lukács, a consumer-protection advocate who runs the non-profit Air Passenger Rights, was sharply critical of airlines marking someone as a no-show in those kinds of circumstances.
“Because we’re talking about business records, a judge who may not be familiar with how airlines really operate may just give some credit to this nonsense.”
Lukács said that, unfortunately, experiences like the Nobles and the Saanichton’s family are more common than most people think.
Most major airlines participate in something called codeshare agreements — essentially partnerships that allow one airline to sell tickets on flights operated by another airline.
In this case, KLM and WestJet had a codeshare agreement, where KLM sold the Nobles a ticket on a WestJet flight for a route that KLM itself doesn’t operate.
Ultimately, Lukács said it would be KLM’s responsibility to fix the situation as the original contracted airline, but that WestJet’s listing of the Nobles as no-shows is particularly troubling.
“The more airlines that are involved in some situation, the more odds there are [that] things go wrong,” Lukács said.
Lukács said many airlines, especially in recent years, have not sufficiently invested in the technology and expertise that would make their operations run smoothly.
“If you put yourself in the shoes of the airline, harming passengers is actually the rational economic decision to make, because it’s cheaper for the airline to do that than to actually hire the right people and do things properly.”
Lukács said most airlines count on passengers with grievances to simply get exhausted by the long process of trying to get their money back, and give up.
“Because there are no sufficient serious or severe consequences for airlines that break the law, there’s no real incentive for the airline to comply,” he said.
Lukács advises customers who feel they have been wronged by an airline to make one single and clear attempt to get their money back from the airline, and if that doesn’t work out swiftly, then file a case against them in small claims court, as the Nobles did. Otherwise they’ll waste their time attempting to get the airline to right the wrong, he said.
“It becomes frustrating if you think that they’re going to be nice,” he said. “Once you have accepted that these people are not nice and that the only way to talk to them is by serving them small claims papers, then all of a sudden it kind of all makes sense.”
KLM and WestJet did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the earlier case of the Hood family from Saanichton, after their story was published in the Times Colonist on Wednesday, Air Canada emailed them to say the full price of their emergency tickets was being refunded.
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