Nothing but chaos for what was supposed to be a relaxing escape in the Dominican Republic.
Alisa and I were on our way to Punta Cana with a connection in Toronto with WestJet. We were booked for the redeye, departing YVR at 10:55pm. It started off with the plane being delayed about an hour coming in... but whatever, no worries as we had a 3.5 hour overlay in Toronto...
As we were ascending, a peculiar smell invaded the cabin. 20min later, the pilot announced that we had struck a flock of birds that had gone through the engine... great... had to turn around back to Vancouver Airport which took another 20-30min. After another 20min on the ground as we waited for the engineering report, we were then de-planed and sat in the lounge, waiting for them to prepare another plane for us. After about an hour, we boarded the new plane. I asked the WestJet Attendant if we were going to be able to make our connection flight, and was told that we would JUST make it! Phew! Plane was scheduled to arrive at 8:50, and boarding was at 9:15am. Perfect! ...
About 15min after everyone was seated, the pilot then announced that they had no fuel and that we had to wait another hour or so to get the fuel... All the fuel attendants had gone home so they had to wake someone to come. There goes our trip to Punta Cana! But that's okay, most likely WestJet will put us in a hotel for a night and then we would be able to go the next day, right?
NOPE! After we arrived, we booked it to the WestJet customer service desk where we were told that we wouldn't be able to fly out for TWO days because there were no other flights available. Well if that were the case, that means our 4night vacation in paradise would be cut down to only two. It was very difficult to extend our vacation to still get our 4nights so we had to contact our travel agent to figure things out.
Pretty bad news right? Well after about 1.5hours talking on the phone trying to figure things out, we realized that our baggage was missing... WHAT??! YEAH... so we spent another hour or so trying to deal with that!
At that point, Alisa and I were just going mental. We were tired, hungry, upset, angry, confused, and aggravated. We just wanted to go home because it had been so emotionally draining. But the issue was, that if we did decided to go home, we would lose out on about $2000 worth of travel. We could have argued with WestJet to reimburse us, but that would mean more time spent on arguing, and nothing was gauranteed that they would have done anything. But at the same time, if we continued forward with traveling to Punta Cana without our luggage, we would be VERY VERY VERY upset. Lose-lose situation. We were also given the option to fly the next day, but that would mean we would have to fly with Air Canada, putting in another $700 in flights. So now we had 3 options, all of them putting us in a shitty situation. And we needed to make a decision...
We needed a break so we went to the hotel to check in, rest, and eat. Fortunately, after a few hours, we got a call from WestJet telling us they had found our luggage. What a relief! We decided to continue on the trek to Montreal and to extend our trip by 2 days... We managed to spend the evening and the next day in Toronto relaxing and doing nothing.
Surprise surprise! Our flight departing from Toronto to Montreal was delayed 45min...
WestJet was kind enough to give us meal vouchers for the two days that we were stranded, BUT they didn't give us enough money. They gave us $10 each to spend on each meal, but at the hotel, each meal was like $15. So I still had to put money out of my pocket for the difference.
What was supposed to take us only about 10hours of travel time to get to Punta Cana, took actually around 66hours! ARGG!!!!!