For many travellers, a cancelled flight is more than an inconvenience. It can mean missed work, disrupted family plans, unexpected hotel stays and mounting financial stress.
But for dozens of WestJet passengers, the frustration did not end when their flights were cancelled. It intensified when they were denied compensation after the fact.
Now, growing questions are being raised about whether some of those cancellations were truly unavoidable safety issues, or whether operational decisions may have helped the airline avoid significant payouts under Canada’s Air Passenger Protection Regulations (APPR).
A vacation ending in chaos
For Brad Vanderwilk and his girlfriend, the final evening of their Mexican vacation in Los Cabos took an abrupt turn while they were sitting down for dinner in March.
Their phones lit up with an email from WestJet informing them that their direct flight to Edmonton the following day had been cancelled.
“We stopped eating because we’re like, ‘How are we gonna get home?’” Vanderwilk recalled. “We’ve got our kids at home. We both have to work. We went into a bit of a tizzy.”
Instead of flying directly home, the couple were rerouted through Victoria, forced into an overnight stay and ultimately arrived home roughly 16 hours late.
Under Canada’s APPR rules, passengers delayed more than nine hours can be entitled to up to $1,000 per person — but only if the disruption was within the airline’s control and not required for safety reasons.
When Vanderwilk submitted a compensation claim, WestJet denied it, citing “unscheduled maintenance required for safety.”
But flight records later reviewed by investigative reporters appear to complicate that explanation.
An aircraft swap?
According to the flight data, the aircraft originally assigned to Vanderwilk’s flight was replaced with another plane that had already been grounded for two days.
The cancellation reportedly occurred the very same minute the aircraft swap was made.
Meanwhile, the original aircraft was reassigned to another route that same day.
“I feel lied to and cheated,” Vanderwilk said. “They’re just trying to do what they can to not pay anybody anything.”
His experience was not isolated.
After similar concerns were previously reported, dozens of additional passengers came forward with nearly identical stories.
An analysis of flight data tied to those complaints identified 34 separate cases where passengers were denied compensation after aircraft swaps occurred shortly before cancellations.
In each instance, WestJet reportedly cited safety-related maintenance issues.
“I just feel completely blindsided,” said Viren Harjani, whose Toronto-to-Montego Bay flight was cancelled last December.
“They’re lying to our face,” added Simon Turcotte-Langevin, who missed two days of vacation after a cancelled Montreal-to-Puerto Plata flight.
“It’s unethical,” said Lucy Pascal, whose Calgary-to-Puerto Vallarta flight was cancelled. “That pisses me off.”
Experts say the timeline matters
The controversy centres around whether the maintenance explanations genuinely justify the cancellations.
In several cases, the replacement aircraft had reportedly not flown for at least a full day before being assigned to a flight that was ultimately cancelled.
According to Vancouver lawyer Simon Lin, who specializes in air passenger rights and consumer law, that detail is significant.
“There must be a cause and effect,” Lin explained. “Clearly this will not be the case if it [a plane] was already under maintenance and there’s no possibility of taking off.”
In other words, if an aircraft was already known to be unfit to fly before it was assigned to a route, critics argue it becomes harder to characterize the cancellation as an unavoidable last-minute safety issue.
WestJet declined interview requests but stated in writing that aircraft swaps are sometimes necessary to minimize “disruption for the greatest number of guests overall.”
However, the airline did not directly answer questions about why the swaps occurred immediately before cancellations or why compensation claims were subsequently denied.
“It is called fraud”
Perhaps the strongest criticism has come from Gábor Lukács, founder of the https://airpassengerrights.ca/en/about/team/gabor-lukacs.
“There’s a pattern of a good aircraft being swapped with a bad one and then passengers are being told, ‘Sorry, the aircraft broke down,’” Lukács said.
“It is called fraud. There’s no other way to describe it.”
Lukács argues that airlines are free to make operational decisions about aircraft assignments, but says the issue becomes problematic when passengers are allegedly given misleading explanations afterward.
“It is swapping and then pretending that it was a maintenance and safety-related cancellation. That is what is fraudulent.”
He also noted that Canada’s airline regulator — the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) — previously ruled against WestJet in a similar 2022 aircraft swap case, yet the complaints appear to continue.
“It keeps happening again and again,” Lukács said. “There are no consequences.”
The financial implications are substantial. Lukács estimates that airlines can avoid paying anywhere from roughly $75,000 to $200,000 per cancelled flight depending on the number of affected passengers and the length of delays.
A Regulatory Investigation Underway
The Canadian Transportation Agency has since launched an active enforcement investigation into aircraft swap complaints following earlier reporting on the issue.
While the CTA declined interviews due to the ongoing investigation, a spokesperson confirmed that the agency “takes allegations of tariff breaches seriously.”
Whether the newly surfaced cases deepen the regulator’s concerns remains unclear.
Passengers Say They Still Have Questions
For Vanderwilk and several others, the most frustrating part has been the lack of transparency.
Passengers say they repeatedly asked WestJet for details about the maintenance issues that allegedly caused their cancellations, including when the problems were first identified and why aircraft swaps occurred so close to departure times.
According to Lin, simply labeling a cancellation as “unplanned maintenance” may not satisfy legal disclosure obligations.
“Just providing a label, ‘unplanned maintenance,’ is not sufficient,” he said.
He referenced a CTA decision stating airlines must provide enough information for passengers to understand the true cause of a disruption and assess whether a compensation denial should be challenged.
In Vanderwilk’s final correspondence with WestJet, he reportedly questioned how a plane could be swapped and his flight cancelled in the exact same minute.
He says the airline never addressed the question directly.
“It’s all very frustrating,” he said. “There was just, ‘We consider this case closed, we’re no longer looking into it.’”
Now, he plans to take the matter to small claims court.
“They’re not acting in good faith,” Vanderwilk said. “They should be just doing what is expected of them as a national carrier.”
What do you think? Was it necessary maintenance or a loophole for corporate gain on WestJet’s part?
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