Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Winter traveling woes

Ian and I were supposed to be flying to Edmonton tonight. We had planned to fly on Westjet out of the Kitchener-Waterloo airport, which is much closer than Toronto.

Traveling in winter can be unpredictable here because we get wicked storms here; flights can be delayed or canceled depending on what's going on. We had a ginormous storm come through today and this evening. Roads are closed all over the place and there are accidents everywhere. There was snow, rain, ice pellets, and freezing rain. As a result, the plane on which we were supposed to leave tonight couldn't land and was diverted to Hamilton, so our flight was canceled.

The Westjet people were very helpful. They booked another flight for us (which wound up on the wrong day, but we've just called and corrected it) to leave Toronto at 7:15am tomorrow. Westjet also arranged and paid for us to take a taxi home from the KW airport and gave us a taxi chit for the cab to Toronto tomorrow morning.

I know that not everyone was happy with how things went, but I have to say that I thought that Westjet handled everything very well. Within 45 minutes of the plane being canceled, everyone had worked out an alternate plan and taxis were on their way. And when we had to call and change the re-booking, the person was super-nice and helpful even though they're crazy busy because of the weather.

I highly recommend you fly Westjet if you can choose to over the other airline. Even though the weather makes traveling suck, Westjet makes it suck less.

2 comments:

Darling Jee said...

Yes I agree, Westjet is great. Even if they were half as friendly and accommodating, they would still make Air Canada (and most of the North American airlines) look bad.

Can I be so bold as to make a blog request? NY Fashion Week is happening right now and you always have such interesting insights. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Chantelle said...

Sure, I can do that over the next while. The current shows are for next fall (Fall '09). That's the season tyou want reviewed, right?

Take care,
Chantelle