Family, Sunwing at odds over missed flight
A Toronto man is asking Sunwing Airlines for almost $5,000 in outof-pocket costs after he and his two daughters were denied boarding on a flight from London in August 2012.
He also wants the Canadian Transportation Agency to look into allegations that the airline breached its contractual duty to offer him another flight within a reasonable time period.
Sunwing’s proposal to make his family wait six days for a flight to Toronto was “unreasonable and unacceptable,” Raymond Nawrot says in an affidavit sent to the federal regulatory agency.
Mark Williams, president of Sunwing Airlines, said the family members couldn’t board the flight because the check-in counter had already closed.
Check-in counters are open three hours before a scheduled departure, according to Sunwing’s international tariff rule, and close 60 minutes before a flight is supposed to leave
“Based on what the ground handlers told us in London, they kept the counters open for an hour prior to the flight, but the passenger wasn’t there,” Williams said. “We made an offer to pay half the costs. He didn’t want to accept it and went to the CTA.”
The airline is owned by Sunwing Travel Group, which offers lowcost package holidays.
“Air-only is a small portion of what we do,” Williams said, adding that there isn’t a schedule of daily flights to Toronto from London’s Gatwick Airport.
In documents sent to the CTA (and provided to me), Nawrot’s lawyer Louis Beliveau outlines what he says happened with the flight that was scheduled to leave Gatwick on Aug. 10, 2012, at 12:20 p.m. (local time).
On Aug. 9 and 10, Beliveau says, Sunwing sent four email messages to the family, announcing changes in the return journey. The last email said the flight would leave on Aug. 11 at 2:25 a.m. — a delay of more than 14 hours. Nawrot and his daughters went by subway to London’s Victoria Station, the lawyer said, enclosing a credit card statement showing they purchased their train tickets to Gatwick before midnight on Aug. 10. After a ride of about 50 minutes, confirmed by the train schedule that night, Beliveau said the family arrived at the Sunwing check-in counter at about 1:10 a.m. on Aug. 11, 75 minutes before the departure time — only to find it closed and the lights dimmed. The next day, Sunwing offered to send the family to Toronto on its flight leaving Aug. 16. Instead, Nawrot booked Air Canada flights on Aug. 12, since his daughters were enrolled in a sports camp starting that day. In an email last October, Sunwing said the family didn’t get a boarding pass and present checked baggage before the 60-minute cutoff. It offered a refund of the unused portion of the tickets and $150 each in future travel discounts. “My daughters and I did arrive at the check-in desk in good time for the flight, specifically nearly an hour and a half before its scheduled departure,” Nawrot responded in an email. “My daughters and I were not the only passengers who found themselves denied boarding at this time.”
Did Sunwing’s check-in counter close earlier than it was supposed to because the flight was leaving in the wee hours of the morning?
“Since I started this airline in 2004, I’ve never heard of that happening,” Williams said in an interview.
Gabor Lukacs, an airline passenger rights advocate living in Halifax, helped prepare the CTA complaint. Nawrot wrote to him last January after seeing a Star article about a case he’d won involving Porter Airlines.
Nawrot is claiming out-of-pocket costs of $4,963.32. That includes three one-way tickets to Toronto, one night at a hotel before the delayed flight and two nights at a hotel after being denied boarding, plus meals for two days.