Air Canada will now have to pay up to passengers that they bump. Passengers who get bumped from a flight could receive as much at $800 cash depending on the delay, according to new rules by the Canadian Transportation Agency.
Starting September 18, new rules will go into effect which require passengers to be given $200, $400 or $800 per person depending on whether the delay is less than two hours, between two and six hours, or more than six hours. This rule will only apply to passengers that do not voluntarily get bumped from a flight, CBC reports.
The CTA is also pushing the airline to give cash rather than travel vouchers. The carrier would have to offer vouchers at a one-to-three exchange rate, so $1 in cash would be the equivalent of $3 in travel vouchers. Passengers can insist that they be given cash rather than travel vouchers for being bumped from a plane.
The airline already had a compensation of $100 for bumping passengers, but the CTA upheld a complaint from Halifax mathematician and air passenger rights advocate Gabor Lukacs, in May, saying that the rate was too low. Lukacs started looking into the compensation rules in 2011 after his own flight was overbooked.
Air Canada was given 30 days by the CTA to explain why they shouldn't have to come up with a new compensation scale. CTA concluded that Air Canada couldn't provide evidence that coming up with a new compensation scale for bumped passengers would be a financial hardship for the company.
Lukacs calls the ruling an important first step in bringing Canada in line with most of the Western World. The U.S. and the European Union both have compensation scales in which they offer reasonable compensation to passengers who got bumped from an overbooked flight and face a delay.
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