Absolute garbage airline and lying customer service. There are so many instances to list I'll just pick a few: all within the same return flight:
- Flight from Vancouver to Hong Kong was delayed over an hour due to a broken coffee machine. Yes, that was the actual reason given. This resulted in a very nearly missed connection, only saved from my family's athleticism in the airport sprint in Hong Kong.
- Flight returning from Hong Kong to Vancouver - incoming flight was delayed by 3 hours. No reason given. We inevitably missed our connection in Vancouver. The way they handled it was atrocious. They split us up (a family of 3 with a young child and my wife that doesn't speak English) so that one "batch" would fly on a later flight that same evening, and the other "batch" would stay overnight in Vancouver and fly onwards the next day. They booked us a hotel and said, and I quote, "all of your additional expenses will be covered; just contact Customer Service after your flight". That's good, because due to extra taxi rides and food and lost time at work, that's hundreds of dollars of compensation. But guess what? Low and behold, they rejected our compensation claim and said it was "because of weather delays and therefore outside of their control and not covered in their compensation policy". That's an interesting lie, but I guess that means their compensation policy is very inconsistent - I mean, they paid for our hotel, right? So I guess it's more like "everything is up to our discretion, and our discretion is that we will never compensate you except in instances where we are legally obligated to". And that weather story was an absolute fabrication - I checked that flight and there were no weather-related issues at along the route of the incoming flight. They are liars from start to finish.
- They also damaged one of our bags. We didn't realize this until about 10 days after arriving, and guess how long you have to claim baggage damage? 7 days. That's fantastic. I'm not that bothered because I'm sure they would have just found another lie to get out of compensating us anyway. Maybe the fake weather disruption damaged the bag?