Customer Service Hell

Aeroplan Hell

For those of you who don't know, I'm in Calgary right now. I was originally going to be in Edmonton this weekend, but through a combination of stupidity and bad luck, I ended up in Calgary. I'm fine with it—I get to meet up with some old friends and I've had a great time so far.



Aeroplan was a great help when I needed to switch my flight. Because they only have seats on certain flights, I wasn't able to switch my flight from London to Calgary, so I went London-Toronto-Edmonton, then took a shuttle from the airport to a hotel, then a business-class Greyhound-equivalent to Calgary. Basically I started traveling at 7:30 AM on Friday, and got to my hotel at 8 PM (6 PM local time).

I'm supposed to fly home tomorrow, so I went down to the hotel's business centre to print off my boarding pass. You can do that 24 hours in advance. It didn't let me do it, but that was at about 2:30. "Duh," I thought, "my flight's not until 4:15. I'll come back down later."

I came back up to my room to chill out and looked up my itinerary to get my booking info. It turned out that my flight was at 6 PM, not 4:15. Since someone's picking me up in London, this was a big change. It said I wouldn't be getting in to London until nearly 3 in the morning.

So I called Aeroplan because I didn't realize they'd made that change and wanted to find out what was going on. I found out I was wrong on a few things--my new flight was at 6 AM, not PM, and it was for MONDAY. This wouldn't be an issue except that I hadn't booked off Monday. And the hotel wasn't aware of that. And I don't like the idea of sleeping in the streets of Calgary--it gets cold here!

The person I talked to maintained that I was responsible for knowing about the change because I made it 2 weeks ago. It's a very understandable position and yes, I take responsibility for that. But, here's my point: I called them to switch my flight from leaving from Edmonton to leaving from Calgary. I never said anything about switching dates, or I'd have mentioned it to my boss that I needed Monday off as well.

So my new flight is at 9:20 PM tomorrow. I fly from Calgary to Vancouver to Toronto to London. I get in to London around 9 AM on Monday. I have a full extra day in Calgary tomorrow with nothing really to do. I'm sure I'll be okay, this is a fun city. But because of someone doing their job wrong 2 weeks ago, I'm flying 4000 km tomorrow night. If you're up really, really late on Sunday night, and you see a plane in the sky, that winking light you see will be me, giving the finger to all of Aeroplan.