The amount of complaints on this forum, compared to it's size belies the idea that Air Canada is a good airline... And it might do them some good to read the customer feedback.
On the issue of overbooking, your casual acceptance of it as normal and "business is business" is breathtaking. The justification for overbooking in the past was that a good proportion of the tickets were refundable, and on many routes there was significant overcapacity. It was therefore good yield management to overbook, and given the excess capacity, the disruption was minimal.
Today, there is very little over capacity and the vast majority of tickets sold are non-refundable. In any other business to sell a service you can't provide is fraud. How they get away with this is beyond me. To compound the problem, at times of high demand, such as Thanksgiving or Christmas, some of the passengers denied boarding can face not getting on an alternative flight for days. There are horror stories in here where it can be a week. Passengers who don't turn up are not rude...they are simply not taking the service. The airline will charge them regardless. Is it rude if you book tickets to a show and for business or other reasons you decide not to go? Your stance is ridiculous... And you clearly can't see this from the customers point of view. Sadly that is all too prevalent in the industry, whether you work in the terminal or for the airline itself, and that compounds the problem.
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