A family from Calgary almost had their summer vacation squashed because WestJet suddenly cancelled their flight.

Ali Moshiri had planned a special getaway to California with his wife and kids, where they would enjoy theme parks like Legoland and the San Diego Zoo.

He had booked their flight with WestJet months in advance for Monday, July 1. The days leading up to their departure were stressful for Moshiri because of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association’s (AMFA) strike.

The AMFA's surprise decision to proceed with a strike beginning on the evening of Friday, June 28, forced WestJet to abruptly cancel 150 flights at the start of the busy Canada Day long weekend. The cancellations impacted 20,000 passengers.

Moshiri anxiously followed the news on the night of June 30 into the wee hours of Monday, waiting to see if their flight would be affected.

"I couldn't even sleep because I thought that if they're going to cancel it, it's going to happen at around midnight," he said over the phone.

The father of two says he received an email from the carrier at around 1 a.m., notifying passengers that the strike had ended.

The union representing WestJet's aircraft maintenance engineers did, in fact, end their strike at 1:30 a.m. E.T. on July 1.

An hour after Moshiri got the email saying the strike was over, he says he received another one alerting them that their flight later that morning had been cancelled.

AMFA was directed to start work immediately to fully restore services. However, given the highly disruptive nature of the strike, the airline stated that it would take some time and further disruptions over the coming week to return aircraft and crew back into position.

Moshiri says the carrier gave him a couple of options in the flight cancellation email. They could either cancel their trip altogether, ask for a refund, or get rebooked on a flight to San Diego on July 6, the day of their return flight.

"They were offering me to fly to San Diego on the same day and come back," he laughed. "So, I just rejected that."

In an email statement, a WestJet spokesperson confirmed that although Moshiri's flight was after the strike ended, the cancellation was still due to the labour disruption.

"We sincerely apologize to Mr. Moshiri and his family for the inconvenience they experienced travelling from Calgary to San Diego," said the spokesperson

"Unfortunately, as the July long weekend was a peak travel period across Canada, limited availability existed both within our network and through alternative carriers, making options for re-accommodation extremely challenging."

Eight-hour drives and over $6,000 later

Moshiri was willing to do anything to get his kids to their date with Legoland.

Weighing his options, he looked online to see if it was worth calling WestJet to troubleshoot their situation. Moshiri said most people online said they couldn't get through to an agent, so he decided it wasn’t worth the wait.

He scoured for other flights departing from Canada, but everything was fully booked. So, he decided to look for the closest town in the U.S. with an airport that had flights going to San Diego.

Moshiri ended up booking a Delta flight for Tuesday, July 2, from Bozeman, Montana, to San Diego, with a stopover in Salt Lake City.

He recalled being unable to sleep, probably due to the adrenaline rushing through his veins trying to rebook flights, hotels, rental cars and tickets to attractions. So, they left on Monday at around 6 am and drove eight hours to Bozeman.

They stayed overnight at a hotel, and while there, Moshiri booked their return flight from San Diego to Seattle and back to Bozeman, where they parked their car at the airport.

Thankfully, everything went smoothly once they arrived in California.

"If I cancelled [the trip], then I would've had to tell my children that San Diego is cancelled, Legoland is cancelled, and they would have to stay home for a week," he explained. "I didn't want to do that, so I told them that we're going to change the plan, and they were still happy, but it was a long drive."

Moshiri was content with his solution, but it cost him a pretty penny.

He says rebooking their last-minute flights in the U.S. due to the WestJet cancellation cost them over $6,000 — and that doesn't include additional hotels and parking costs.

In addition, he didn't want to risk booking a direct flight back to Calgary with WestJet in case of further cancellations, so they still had to return to Bozeman and drive another eight hours home.

"Bad communication" from WestJet

A couple of weeks after they returned from their trip, Moshiri submitted refund and reimbursement requests.

A frequent flyer because of his line of work, hes been a platinum WestJet member for years and is quite familiar with the airline’s refund and reimbursement processes.

Moshiri says that he ordinarily receives an email from WestJet confirming that they've received the request and are processing it, but this time around, there was radio silence.

What made this even more frustrating was that it took him two hours to submit a reimbursement request because he had a lot of receipts to submit and had to resize the PDFs so that the form would accept them.

He ended up calling WestJet a few weeks after submitting the requests. Moshiri says a customer service agent helped him get the refund for their flights but that they stopped short of updating him about the reimbursement. So, he submitted another request after a few weeks of not hearing from the airline.

In the last week of August, he called WestJet again, and they finally confirmed that they had received his reimbursement request.

"Finally, after that conversation, I received an email that said, 'We received your request for the reimbursement, but it's too busy, and we are still processing a lot of cases, so we are going to process your case at some point,'" Moshiri recalled.

Thats the last he’s heard from the carrier.

In response, WestJet said that it processes all claims in the order they were received.

"WestJet is obligated to respond to Air Passenger Protection Regulations claims received within a 30-day period. Mr. Moshiri submitted his APPR claim on September 5, 2024," stated a spokesperson.

However, according to the APPR site, you must make a reimbursement claim directly with the airline and can only file complaints with the APPR.

WestJet did not answer a question specifically about why Moshiri hasn't received an update on his reimbursement request.

Air passenger rights advocate Gabor Lukacs says the airline "failed to fulfill its legal obligations to the passenger under the APPR."

He cited section 18 in the APPR, which states that if the cancellation was outside of the airline's control, carriers are required to rebook customers on competitor airlines if they cannot rebook them on their own or partner flights that depart within 48 hours.

"WestJet is liable for the passenger's expenses in this case, even if the cancellation was outside the carrier’s control because it breached its rebooking obligations," explained Lukacs.

Moshiri says he has never had a single problem with WestJet since he started flying with them regularly in 2016. This cancellation was the first major mishap hes experienced.

"I think they had a lot of issues dealing with this situation, but they decided maybe not to take responsibility for that," he said. "I think what they did wrong was bad communication with customers."

He also found it odd that he was still receiving promotional emails from the carrier but no communication about the cancellation.

Ultimately, Moshiri says he's not upset about what happened because he got them to their destination.

He added that even if he wasn't happy, as a frequent flyer, there was nothing else he could do because WestJet is one of the few airlines in Canada.

"There is no competition…I have no option."

With files from Kenneth Chan