WestJet strike: Airline and union negotiate while frustrated travellers

Travellers stranded in Calgary

I’m Ina Sidhu, a business reporter based in Calgary, where stranded passengers at the international terminal at YYC say they just want to get home.

Just steps away from where a huge crowd of flight attendants is picketing, Zach Sherrard is holding his own sign with the message: “I just wanna go home.”

He’s trying to get home to Denver. He left St. John’s yesterday and hasn’t slept.

So he’s turning to his dad.

“Luckily my dad’s retired and can actually drive up from Colorado to get me because that’s faster than a flight right now.”

“He’ll get here sometime tomorrow and I’ll get back sometime Tuesday. The best flight I could have gotten would have been Tuesday night with an eight-hour layover in Dallas,” he said. 

Sherrard says luckily his boss has been understanding that he’ll miss work tomorrow.

He says even through the frustration of his day, he supports the flight attendants.

David Brittain and his wife live in Phoenix, Ariz. 

They just got off an Alaska cruise in Vancouver and were connecting through Calgary.

Brittain says they rebooked, but that flight was also cancelled. 

“I’m $3,500 deep into this,” he said. “We didn’t hear anything about it while we were on the ship.”

Eric Bolton is trying to get home to South Carolina.

He was rebooked for tomorrow, but that flight could get cancelled, too.

Bolton says he’s feeling helpless.

“Pretty exacerbated and exhausted. We’ve just been getting the runaround all day. We don’t blame the ticketing agents or anything. They’re working with what they’ve got, but it seems like everyone’s been left in the lurch and given really no options. So people are kind of waiting around.”