Passenger warns of unwarranted high baggage fee collected through Air Canada booking

The cost of flying has gone up, but it hasn’t deterred some Canadians from taking a well-needed vacation. And while we might do our best to budget for the trip, an unforeseen expense can always be thrown your way. But what if you were made to pay more for something than the price you were initially quoted?

A frustrating experience echoed by Siju Varghese after he was made to pay an unexpectedly high baggage fee when boarding the first leg of his return flight home to Canada.

“Why am I being charged so much in baggage fees when the ticket says it was $75 dollars?” Varghese tells CityNews.

In January, he and his travel partner boarded a flight in Edmonton. The itinerary, booked through Air Canada, included connecting flights through Toronto and Bogota, with a final destination in Quito, Ecuador.

On his way there, his Aeroplan card covered the cost for both pieces of checked luggage. But on the return leg, when checking in for their first flight with Avianca Ecuador, an interline partner of Air Canada, Varghese was told each bag could be checked in for a fee of $170 USD.

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“They showed me on their system that Air Canada is saying that they have to charge me a baggage fee,” he explained. “I told them, here is my Air Canada ticket. It shows that my baggage fee should be $75 dollars at the most. They said they can’t help me. That it’s Air Canada’s baggage fee that they are seeing on their system.”

After being advised to dispute the charge directly with Air Canada and having called their customer service line that indicated a four hour hold time, Varghese decided to pay the $340 USD and resolve the issue upon his return home.

While connecting through Toronto he spoke to an Air Canada employee who told the Alberta resident that he would have to dispute the fee with Avianca.

“When I got back to Edmonton, I sent an email to Air Canada saying it doesn’t matter who charged the fee. All that matters is that I have a ticket issued by you, Air Canada, and on the ticket it states $75 dollars. I was surprised to come to the airport and see a charge of $170 USD per bag,” Varghese tells CityNews, adding that he included the Canadian Transport Agency’s section on interline baggage fees.

Interline flights are an arrangement between carriers booking passengers on a single itinerary that uses multiple airlines. The added convenience is not having to purchase multiple tickets as well as having a streamline approach to your checked luggage, as it’s transferred between those airlines en route to your final destination.

But as part of that agreement, the Canadian Transport Agency’s rules state that these carriers are expected to apply a single set of baggage rules to the entire itinerary, including the name of the carrier whose baggage rules apply.

This is not to be confused with a codeshare flight, an arrangement in which one airline sells seats on a flight operated by another airline. In this case, the baggage rules of the airline operating that flight will apply and should be indicated on your ticket.

A few weeks later Varghese received a response from Air Canada.

“Unfortunately, we cannot refund any fees collected by another carrier. As Avianca is one of our Star Alliance members, I have forwarded your concerns for their review. They have since responded that they will not be issuing the refund. Please note that the decision of the operating carrier, in this instance Avianca, is final”, reads the email from a customer service agent. They also referred Varghese to a page on their website that displays how to confirm if your itinerary includes a codeshare or interline flight and what baggage rules apply.

They instead offered him a $350 ecoupon as a “gesture of goodwill.”

CityNews reached out to Air Canada questioning why the interline baggage rules from the CTA did not apply in this case.

“It appears that in this instance our partner carrier did not correctly interpret the itinerary receipt, we will follow up with them but in the meantime refund the customer,” writes their media relations team in an email.

While the Canadian Transport Agency said they could not comment on this specific case, they did state an airline could face Administrative Monetary Penalties in respect of its failure to apply its tariff.

“If the CTA finds that the airline has failed to properly apply the terms and conditions that apply to the passenger’s ticket, it can order the airline to take the corrective measures that it considers appropriate or to pay compensation for the expenses incurred by a passenger,” says Martine Maltais of CTA’s media team, in relation to a direct complaint to their agency by a passenger.

As of March 20, the growing backlog of air passenger complaints sits at 42,000 with more than 1,500 complaints related to baggage alone.

Gabor Lukacs, president of the Air Passenger Rights advocacy group, says wrongfully collected baggage fees through interline bookings is an issue he’s heard before but that it’s part of a larger systemic problem when it comes to Canada’s Air Passenger Protection Regulations, rooted in lack of enforcement.

“The system is built in a way where we have rules, but we don’t have enforcement,” says Lukacs.

He’s hopeful that a private member’s bill introduced by NDP transport critic Taylor Bachrach in March, accompanied with a parliamentary petition, will enact positive change through a list of 21 recommendations that include closing existing loopholes.

“The air passenger protection regulations are regulations that are built on a framework that are part of the Canada Transportation Agency. It’s the framework which is broken, not just the APPR,” he maintains. “What bill C-327 does is fix the framework so it matches the European Union’s gold standard in a number of key areas”.

If the Canadian Transportation Agency were to determine that a passenger’s rights have been infringed, all passengers on that same flight should be contacted and offered refunds or compensation, based on the house committee report, essentially benefiting both passengers who exercise their rights and those who might not be aware that their rights were violated.

“This is happening to lots of people,” says Varghese, who adds he has noticed others sharing similar stories on social media. He’s hopeful that by telling his story, it draws attention to the issue of unwarranted high baggage fees being collected by large carriers through these types of bookings.

Air Canada has since reached out to Varghese offering him only $100 out of the $310 additional Canadian dollars he was made to pay to check in his luggage.