Air Canada: customer service, redefined

I usually fly CX whenever possible since they generally have better food and service than their competitors. This time I decided to give Air Canada a try for my flight to HKG. For over $400 CAD in savings, AC would’ve had to fuck it up pretty hard for me to regret going with them. Now that I am in Hong Kong, did I regret my decision in flying Air Canada? Before takeoff: kind of, after landing: no.

When I arrived at the YVR Air Canada counter at 12:10pm, I was greeted a rude lady with the words “Where to?.” I told her my destination and her words immediately were “You’re late, we’ll put you on the next flight.”

From a business standpoint, shouldn’t it be Air Canada’s best interest to put me on this flight instead of leaving the seat empty? It seems like to me, her best interest was to make sure I didn’t make it on this flight. Mind you, I was not late; according to documentation printed on the itinerary, the boarding gate cut-off times for international flights on AC is 30 minutes. Baggage cut-off time is 60 minutes but that aas irrelevant, I wasn’t going to check my baggage anyway. I also checked-in online prior to arriving at the airport.

The lady never attempted to ask me if I was checked-in or not, not did she ask me if I needed my baggage checked. All she did was try to get me on the next flight. In fact, she didn’t even have my name!

I told her I don’t have checked luggage and I am already checked-in. She finally asks me for my name and passport and gave me my boarding pass. Her way of saying good-bye to me was “You have to run.” At that point, my impression summed up as follows: Hey Air Canada, thanks for giving me the privilege to pay to fly with your airline and be treated like a piece of shit.

To be continued in part 2 where I will document what happened during the flight and my concluding remarks…

The start of a new year

At the end of 2009, I challenged Howie and Josh, my fellow co-workers at layerboom to participate in a blogging challenge called Project52. We even convinced Josh to sign up and pay for a domain name, and themed up Howie’s blog. I’ve been extremely busy these couple of weeks and was not able to get a post up for the first week of the challenge. Josh even called me out on it. In a later blog post, I will explain what I’ve been up to these few weeks that prevented me from blogging.

Beginning this week, I will do one post a week for the next 52 weeks. If I fail to do so, I will buy lunch for everyone at Layerboom for a week(¹).

Topics I will blog about will include but not limited to:

• technology and programming (ie. Ruby/Rails, MongoDB)
• upcoming experience of working from Hong Kong
• traveling
• our new office
• hosting and virtualization (I work for a hosting related company after-all!)
• and other random stuff.