B.C. woman says she spent more time stranded in airport looking for lost luggage than in Portugal

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Hundreds of thousands of passengers have had domestic and international flights delayed or cancelled at Canadian airports. Not only have many people been stranded, sometimes sleeping in airports for days at a time, there’s also been chaos in the baggage claim area.

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“I just wanted to come back home,” said Mahan Zaeri, a single mother and business owner from Vancouver who regretted taking her first vacation since 2020 after she got stranded at Toronto Pearson International Airport.

“There were people sleeping all over the airport, little babies and kids everywhere, it was really sad.”

A delayed departure from Vancouver on June 16 caused her to miss her connecting flight from Toronto to Lisbon, Portugal. With Air Canada saying the best they could do was a flight days later, she purchased a ticket with another carrier at her own expense and had to leave Toronto without retrieving her luggage.

“There needs to be better communication, you can’t just take people’s money and treat them like this,” Zaeri said.

Persistent staffing shortages and booming demand have led to frequent flight cancellations by airlines on both sides of the Atlantic, causing chaos for vacationers as the summer season swings into gear. Social media sites have been flooded with photos and videos showing unclaimed bags strewn across airports, as people complain of missing luggage.

“Airport and airline operations have been impacted by staffing issues at government third-party providers. Also, at airports there have been capacity and baggage system issues,” said Air Canada, in a statement.

“Long processing times at airports and remaining pandemic requirements continue to result in flight delays and in some instances cancellations and these can have knock-on effects not only for our customers but can also impact our employee resources and operations.”

Toronto Pearson Airport told National Post it was not to blame for the baggage chaos.

“Airlines have responsibility for reuniting passengers with their luggage,” the airport said in a statement.

According to analytics firm Data Wazo, 54 per cent of domestic flights to Canada’s four largest airports were either delayed or cancelled over the past week. Hardest hit was Toronto’s Pearson airport, with more than 700 flights (51 per cent) delayed and 15 per cent cancelled. Vancouver has seen 40 per cent of flights delayed in the past month, while Air Canada had over 1,200 flights delayed in the past week alone.

Air Canada said Wednesday night it will cut more than 15 per cent of its departures in July and August to deal with the overwhelming travel resurgence. The move will see more than 9,500 flights dropped from the airline’s schedule — already operating at just 80 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.

The CEO of WestJet told The Canadian Press it had already gradually scaled back its summer schedule through the spring to land at 32 per cent fewer trips in and out of Toronto’s Pearson airport in July than in 2019.

With COVID restrictions lifting, Zaeri, 35, thought it was the perfect time to take a short trip to Portugal with friends.

But her Air Canada flight that was scheduled from Vancouver at 2 p.m. on June 16 left two hours late. That made her miss her flight from Toronto. It was around 1 a.m. when she reached Toronto’s airport, where, she says, she received no help in rebooking her flight, like many others.

While at Pearson airport, Zaeri says she had to wait for hours until she was told that the earliest Air Canada flight she could get would be June 21. That would mean missing over half of her trip.

To save time, she booked a flight with another carrier for June 19 at her own expense, but Air Canada still had her luggage. In the baggage claim area, she found herself in a sea of bags from delayed and cancelled flights from previous days.

“There were five people working there, and thousands of bags lying around,” said Zaeri. “There were bags everywhere unattended, if I grabbed two or four bags nobody would have questioned me.”

While Zaeri was stranded in Toronto, she visited the airport multiple times in search of her bag, but to no avail.

In the end, she flew to Portugal without her luggage. After repeated checks, she finally found it at the Lisbon airport on June 26, in the middle of another sea of bags. She said she located it herself, with no help from authorities, despite filing reports and spending hours on hold with customer service. The Air Canada tracker still shows the status of her luggage as “unknown,” she said.

“We are just a number to them,” she said.

Consumer rights advocates have called on Air Canada to provide compensation to passengers whose summer flights have been cancelled.

Zaeri’s trip ended up costing a lot more than expected, and she says she spent more time at the airport than her travel destination.

“We were not sleeping and starting to lose our minds,” she said. “Honestly I was better off not going on vacation.”

— With additional reporting from The Canadian Press and Bloomberg

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