A missing space on an Air Canada ticket cost a passenger $11,000
Passengers should carefully check their booking confirmations for errors, says the airline
A man from Milton who booked a trip to Thailand this winter was forced to cover a massive ticket price increase at the last minute over a missing space between his middle and last names.
CTV News reports that when Brandon Bowman noticed the missing space, he called Air Canada to flag it. The employee who took his call said it would not cause any problems. He called back again two days before his flight just to be safe, and that time, received a much different response.
“The next employee said, ‘it is not fine, we will have to cancel everything,’ and the price of a new ticket jumped about $6,000 in price,” Bowman said.
That brought his total to over $11,000. Not wanting to cancel what he described as a dream trip that had been planned for months, he paid it.
Upon returning home, he called Air Canada again, to advocate for a refund given that he’d caught the error and been told it wouldn’t cause issues.
When contacted by CTV, an Air Canada spokesperson said, “We reviewed this case and we concluded that the customer should have been advised more clearly about his options during the initial call, which would have remedied this situation.”
The airline advised passengers to carefully check their booking confirmations for errors. “In particular, people should check the itinerary, travel dates and name spellings,” the spokesperson said.
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Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
