Air Canada being accused of cancelling tickets without warning
Over the past several months, no less than eight Air Canada customers have come forth with complaints claiming their bookings have been cancelled without warning from the airline.
Nina Chung, a 35-year-old woman from Vancouver, is the latest person to claim that Air Canada reversed their credit card payments without informing her. It wasn’t until she checked her credit card statement that Chung even realized her ticket had been refunded, even though it stated on Air Canada’s website that her booking was confirmed. After reaching out to Air Canada about the issue, she was told that the website was mistaken and she not longer had a ticket.
Gabor Lukacs, an air passenger rights advocate, has received many recent complaints from Air Canada customers claiming they’ve have the same issue as Chung. Lukacs believes this might be the result of Air Canada falsely flagging legitimate credit cards as fraudulent, as Air Canada has recently made changes to their fraud detection system.
"There is no doubt there is something fundamentally wrong here with the system," said Lukacs in a CBC investigative report. "A fraud detection system that has so many false positives is obviously faulty."
Air Canada has not yet spoken to comments concerning how these tickets may have been refunded without customer knowledge. However, spokesperson Angela Mah did email a statement to CBC regarding their new online security systems.
"We're optimizing our anomaly detection and prevention tools and security systems constantly, as credit card fraud costs everyone.”
Mah goes on to say, "We sincerely regret inconveniences which may affect our customers …we will be happy to look into any customer situations which do not appear to follow our processes of notification…."