A discount airline tops the grievance list in statistics released Monday by the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA), which rates carriers based on the number of complaints per 100 flights—though details of the complaints were not disclosed when requested.
“The complaint data is based on the information submitted by passengers and may not have been reviewed by the CTA at the time of publishing,” said the agency in a notice, titled “Air Travel Complaints Per 100 flights—By Airline,” on Dec. 19.
“The data is based on the number of flights by airline and does not reflect the number of passengers per flight or the size of the aircraft.”
As first reported by Blacklock’s Reporter, the CTA data shows that between April 1 and Sept. 30 of this year, Edmonton-based ultra low cost carrier Flair Airlines Ltd. had the highest complaint rate of 13.7 per 100 flights.
Swoop Inc., a discount carrier owned by Westjet, trailed closely at 12.6 per 100 flights, followed by Sunwing Airlines (8.6), Westjet (4.9), Air Canada (3.6), and Air Transat (2.6).
Backlog of 30,000 Complaints
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, CTA did not respond to requests for raw data used to calculate the complaint rate, which runs counter to the Electronic Collection of Air Transportation Statistics program, mandated by Parliament in 2019, for all commercial airlines to submit their performance data for release to the public.In a hearing before the Commons transport committee (TRAN) on Nov. 28, Michelle Greenshields, director general of the Dispute Resolution Branch at CTA, testified that the current backlog of air passenger complaints numbers 30,000.
“While we had been receiving an average of 1,500 complaints per month in April, May, and June of this year, complaint volumes jumped to more than 3,000 in July and 5,700 in August,” Greenshields said.
“Despite processing more complaints than before, in 2021–22, we processed over 15,000 complaints, which is more than three times the number of complaints that we were processing annually before the APPR [Air Passenger Protection Regulations] and the pandemic. We still had a significant number of complaints, and that has led to a backlog.”
‘Doing Their Best’
Transport Minister Omar Alghabra told TRAN on Dec. 5 that the CTA “is doing their best to deal with this unprecedented volume” of complaints.Alghabra was responding to Bloc Québécois MP Xavier Barsalou-Duval, who asked if he agreed that a refund should be offered automatically to customers should their flights be cancelled instead of waiting for a reservation to be provided for a new flight within 48 hours—which was mandated by new regulations that amended APPR and announced by the minister in June.
“Again, the last couple of years have been extraordinary, and we saw an extraordinary number of disruptions that certainly caused an unpredictable number of complaints that were not forecasted,” the minister said.
“We are committed to working with them. When I say ‘we,’ I mean the Government of Canada, Transport Canada, and me personally. We work to provide them the resources they need, but we also work with them on figuring out how we can improve the efficiency of the system.”
On Aug. 8, MPs on the Transport Committee unanimously passed a motion asking for Alghabra to testify before them to address the issue of the ArriveCAN app, airport delays, and flight cancellations.
In his testimony before the committee on Aug. 19, Alghabra defended the app, blaming COVID-19 as the culprit for airport delays.
