Canada’s transportation regulator is trying to make the dreaded “flight delayed” email a little easier to swallow for travellers.
Driving the news: Airlines will soon have to provide passengers with hotel rooms, meals, and compensation if their flight is delayed or cancelled, regardless of the reason for the disruption. It's part of a suite of changes the Canadian Transport Agency (CTA) plans to roll out in the new year.
- The new rules would automatically place responsibility for a flight disruption of more than two hours on the airline, replacing the existing system that decides if passengers should be compensated based on the root cause of a delay.
- Right now, airlines only have to provide refunds, hotel rooms and meal vouchers if a flight disruption is caused by something under their control, which is often difficult for passengers to prove.
Why it matters: This grey area of assigning responsibility for disruptions has led to a huge backlog of passenger complaints. Since 2019, CTA has gotten more than 150,000 air travel complaints, many of which are still unresolved.
Bottom line: Canada’s two biggest airlines, Air Canada and WestJet, both rank last in North America for on-time performance. These changes should make it easier for Canadians to get compensated when they're caught in the crosshairs of increasingly common delays.—LA