'It's a waiting game': Travellers still stranded at Pearson as Sunwing grapples with flight delays
CBC
Anegret Cucuz thought she would be on a beach lying on the sand in Aruba by now — but that expectation quickly fizzled after she arrived at Toronto's Pearson International Airport.
Cucuz's flight was supposed to take off at 9:30 a.m. on Monday, but due to unexpected delays that have stranded thousands of Sunwing Airlines passengers, she's just one of many left without answers. The Toronto-based airline says a system outage continues to plague the company that operates its check-in systems.
"We were here pretty much all day yesterday with just poor communication skills and complete chaos," Cucuz said Tuesday.
"Nobody had any answers. Information was very sparse. People were very frustrated."
Cucuz says she herself is frustrated with the ongoing delays that have pushed her flight back several times, but adds the airline has been "very generous" in accommodating passengers with hotel and food vouchers.
"It's a waiting game and you just have to be patient," she told CBC News.
"This is a first world problem, right? ... So, okay, we're going on vacation; it's not the end of the world."
Sunwing says it's trying to come up with a solution to the delays.
"Our team has been working day and night to find alternate ways to get customers to their destination or on return flights home," the airline said in a statement.
As of Tuesday, Sunwing says about 15 out of the more than 40 scheduled flights have been processed since the technical issue first surfaced.
"While our systems provider continues to work on resolving the system outage, we continue to manually process as many flights as possible but expect further delays," the airline said in a tweet Tuesday.
Sunwing says it will compensate all passengers experiencing flight delays over three hours. But some customers say they would rather have their trip cancelled.
Frank Galati arrived at the airport at 6:15 a.m. on Monday. Like Cucuz, he was waiting to board the flight from Toronto to Aruba.
"If it keeps going on that they're going to be delaying, delaying, then cancel the trip and give us back our money or give us a credit, or whatever," Galati said.
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