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If you take flights often, you've probably been there before: you've raced to the terminal to make sure you get on your flight before it leaves, you pass security and customs and finally make it to the gate. It's there you're told you're going to have to wait for the next flight. All that effort has left you stuck in the airport for hours until another flight arrives.
TL;DR Past employees of Air Canada have revealed that the airline has been overselling flights in order to make extra revenue. Tickets that direct to the gate only, without a designated seat, are often the oversold tickets. Needless to say, Twitter is outraged. Read all of the Tweets below.
If it's any consolation, you're definitely not alone. At least 510,000 Air Canada customers are sold plane tickets for overbooked flights per year, according to CBC News. Despite this, the popular airline has continued these practices and even train their employees to mislead customers.
@aircanadaWhy? Well, it turns out that Air Canada is making a ton of money off of the extra tickets sold.
Apparently overselling a flight can happen no matter what your destination is. If your ticket doesn't have a specific seat on the flight, it's basically code that you won't be getting on. This has lead to thousands of people missing family vacations, weddings, holidays, and even serious events such as a surgery.
Because of this, Twitter is definitely outraged.
Never bumped, but have definitely been asked on numerous occasions to give up my seat for what I considered to be shady compensation.
Yes. My husband and I were bumped last August on an air Canada flight to Chicago. They put us on a later flight after the worst customer service I’ve ever experienced. To top it off my husbands luggage didn’t come with us. It came later but they wouldn’t send until the next day
Will the flights be overbooked? Will flyers be given a boarding pass (GTE) that in essence, is just 'Stand By'? Poor biz PR when flyers expect buying a ticket means they're going to be gettng a seat & you've overbooked the flight. #Shame
Customers are not happy.
Other people shared stories of being bumped from a flight.
The last time we used Air Canada, there was a group of 16 of us. We all had pre booked seats. Yet 6 of our group did not get in the flight. They had to drive to Ottawa, then after that to Montreal where they finally got a flight that arrived 12 hrs into our 4 night stay.
The balls on @AirCanada to oversell the only return flight of the day from an island resort destination. 🇹🇨
Not cool that @AirCanada is allowed to oversell their flights and then bribe people to take a later flight with cash and meal vouchers. #airtravel#frequentflyer
@AirCanada nice, forcing your employees to lie to passengers to make more money. Nice nice nice.
@AirCanada deliberately lies to boost profit? And their response is 'So what, it's only 50,000 or so people we screw with'. Fake-seat-selling is fraud. Charge them
Luckily, there is a way to tell whether or not the ticket you've received for your flight is genuine:
To ensure you have an actual seat on a plane, log on to Air Canada's site 24 hours before the flight to choose a seat. Or pay a fee for seat selection when you buy your ticket. With an assigned seat, you won’t have to worry about being put on standby. https://t.co/b0fkzQEqIH