Foolishness takes flight at Air Canada
In the future, if Air Canada ever charges me for soggy chicken alfredo, loses my Samsonite, bumps me from a flight, kills my cat, runs out of Grey Goose, damages my MacBook, sits me next to a screaming baby or does anything even mildly annoying, I’m going to invoke the name of C.J. Poirier and raise bloody hell.
“Excuse me? You gave that lovestruck teen from Michigan a free flight and now you’re charging me 30 bucks to rent a filthy tablet so I can watch an Avengers movie in which the audio is garbled as I lose circulation in my legs because I’m jammed into a middle-row seat smaller than my daughter’s first highchair while I nibble on $10 peanuts that taste like gravel? Are you kidding?”
I’m telling you, Air Canada does not realize what it has just done.
It has given every customer another reason to grumble about Air Canada.
On Friday, in what may be the most useless and idiotic PR stunt in airline history, Air Canada awarded a free flight to Poirier. Why? So the 19-yearold American can travel to Newfoundland and meet his girlfriend, Becca. This is a feel-good story that feels utterly ridiculous. What’s next, Air Canada? Are you going to hold a contest and hand out a boarding pass to someone who doesn’t live near a Taco Bell but is really jonesing for a Nacho Crunch Double Layer Taco? How about a free ride to NYC for someone who wants to loiter inside Rihanna’s new pop-up lingerie store? I’d love a ticket to Winnipeg so I can cheer on the Jets in the next round of the playoffs — what say you?
This foolish tale of teen love and corporate marketing started earlier this month when Poirier reached out to Air Canada on Twitter. How many retweets would it take, he asked, for a round-trip ticket from Detroit to Deer Lake?
Air Canada’s response: 530,000 (population of Newfoundland and Labrador). So Poirier kicked off his #530KforBecca campaign. And he failed miserably. By the deadline earlier this week, he was stalled at about 30,000 retweets. He didn’t even hit 10 per cent of the target. Imagine if Nike said it would give you a free pair of Air Max 270s every year for life if you could jog “from Toronto to Montreal” and then quickly altered the route to “from the CN Tower to the Eaton Centre.”
That is exactly what Air Canada did. The fix was in from the start. So it kept changing the rules to ensure Poirier “earned” his free flight and, more crucially, it earned some free publicity. After Air Canada tried and failed to lure Justin Trudeau and Drake into its little stunt — you know a social media campaign is DOA if you can’t rouse those two publicity hounds — the carrier invented new ways to nudge Poirier past the 530,000 figure it made up, even though he’s still not past 32,000.
If Poirier was an Uber driver and Air Canada was the passenger, it would give him a 5-star rating after he crashed into a tree. I’m afraid this free flight just proves Air Canada doesn’t care about rules, something to keep in mind next time you’re rudely informed your carry-on bag is too big.
If the airline was so keen to give a free flight to someone for the sake of publicity, shouldn’t it have at least found a more worthy cause? Surely there is a Canadian out there who can’t afford to attend a funeral for a distant loved one. Surely there is a Canadian out there who has a rare disease and doesn’t live within driving distance of a specialist. In fact, if you start a list of Good Reasons For Free Flights — unemployed single parent with a job interview in a different city, charity outreach, reunion with a long lost twin — “young love” doesn’t crack the Top 100.
No offence to Poirier: he is just 19! He’s never met Becca in real life! Teenage love can be emotionally intense. But it’s also wildly fickle. This “relationship” could be over before Poirier boards the return flight to Michigan. He dropped out of college and is a Starbucks barista. If anything, Air Canada should have offered him free tuition if he goes back to school so there’s less of a chance he’ll eventually sneak into Canada and end up on social assistance. I understand the airlines must be desperate for good news. From passengers getting beaten and dragged off flights to mysterious deaths of giant rabbits to lost vintage guitars to horror stories at every stage of the air travel experience, when the industry makes news these days, it tends to be bad.
So you can’t blame Air Canada for trying to rustle up some positive vibes.
Unfortunately, this free flight only makes the rest of us remember all the things we never get while flying. This is one sweet gesture that feels like a slap in the face.
The airline may have thought it sweet to award a free flight, but it feels sour for others