Siok Har Lim was nervous about her trip to Europe last November. The Montreal woman wasn’t an experienced traveller, had never visited the countries on her itinerary, and barely spoke any English.
Lim’s multi-leg journey through Germany and Hungary was going smoothly until she arrived at the Budapest airport to fly home and learned Air Canada had cancelled her return flight.
“I was very scared and I did not know what to do,” Lim told Go Public in Cantonese, which her niece translated.
After much confusion, an Air Canada agent explained that Lim’s ticket was cancelled because she had apparently not gotten on an earlier flight from Munich to Berlin and was deemed a “no-show.”
“I don’t understand why Air Canada is saying what they’re saying,” Lim recalled. “Because I actually did board that flight.”
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Not wanting to be stranded in a foreign country on her own — with no ability to communicate with anyone, and only one hour before her flight was set to depart — Lim was forced to purchase a new ticket home, for $2,550.
“She is a senior citizen on a limited income,” said her niece, Ai Li Lim. “Obviously that cost was really stressful for her.”
WATCH | Cancelled over ‘no-shows’:
Safety concerns raised after Air Canada passengers incorrectly deemed ‘no shows’ | Go Public
A handful of passengers had their return tickets cancelled by Air Canada because the airline had no record of them taking earlier flights. The airline calls it a rare malfunction, but others say it’s a safety issue.
Go Public has learned of five other people that Air Canada also incorrectly deemed “no-shows” on three other trips, cancelling their return tickets and refusing to accept evidence such as boarding passes — even selfies taken on the planes — they hadn’t missed an earlier flight.
The cases are cause for concern, since airlines need to know exactly how many people are on the plane and who they are, says an expert on methods of boarding passengers onto planes.
“If it is a systemic problem, like their computer systems not talking to each other, they should get it fixed,” said John Milne, an associate professor of engineering and management at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y.
“In the meantime, how can you … cancel people’s return flights when you know your records aren’t reliable?”
That information is even more critical in extreme situations, such as last month’s American Airlines crash in Washington, said Milne.
“What if a plane goes down and the airline isn’t actually aware of everyone on board?” he said.
A spokesperson for Air Canada said that in each case, the customer’s flight “was not properly recorded” due to “a human error or technological malfunction.”
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