Passenger refund issues flagged before pandemic

An air passenger rights advocate says he flagged problems with refund rules to Ottawa more than a year before authorities said the pandemic brought the issues to light.

Gabor Lukacs, president of Air Passenger Rights, says he spoke with policy experts at the Transport Department and the Canadian Transportation Agency in January 2019 about ambiguities in the new passenger bill of rights.

He says he warned them this could leave airlines with the false impression they can deny customers reimbursement for all cancelled flights.

Internal documents from the Transport Department and the transportation agency suggest it took more than seven months for the government to take action on refunds after it first identified "gaps" in the rules.

The correspondence recently released to a parliamentary committee reveal that in May 2020 officials highlighted regulatory blind spots around reimbursing customers whose flights were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but failed to announce corrective measures until December.

Lukacs says the government had plenty of opportunity to prevent the resulting crisis, which saw thousands of customers out of pocket after carriers scrubbed the bulk of their flight schedules over the past 14 months.

But British Columbia's consumer protection regulator says passengers "should be provided with a full refund in the same way they paid, as outlined in the law."