We’ve flown on a bunch of the euro low cost carriers recently. They have the base price, then extra fees to get a free carryon bag and first section boarding. They seem to have a number of different options/tiers and it’s a bit to wade through but it does mostly work. They are militant, and at some airports the people who check your boarding pass before security are even more so, about your carryon bag. If you have purchased the “premium” to get on first though, they don’t bat an eye at your bags. The difference between what Westjet is doing and the Euro carriers is the price for flights there goes from say 50€ to 100€ for first to board and a checked bag instead of the hundreds more it seems WJ is charging. Hard to compare Euro travel to Canada though given the population. The ultra basic fare email is hilariously bad though. I’m not sure first year marketing students would come up with wording so poor. WJ deserves all the backlash.
We even flew on crappy Ryanair recently and I think it’s getting close where I’d rank them above WJ. No seat pockets on Ryanair flights but they certainly have far superior food choices than WJ, and the price levels weren’t as wide.
As mentioned above they have changed the companion voucher costs. They also seem to be playing games with their fares. The companion voucher can be used if the base fair is high enough. That’s not the fair shown immediately mind you. Say your flight to Iceland shows as $800. Perfect, even after you take of taxes etc it should easily be over $400. Nope. When you click on the line item details, which you don’t see until the final step, the base fair is really $200 and then there is a line “ATC” which must stand for something like air travel cost, which is $400. I’m pretty sure they are playing games with their costs to make it so you can’t book econo seats using your companion voucher on popular flights. To use your voucher on the euro flights I looked at (Iceland, Paris, London) they all had low base fairs unless you booked premium econo which even with the discount was more than straight econo. The worst example was Paris I think. The base fare was $300ish and the ATC charge was $900.
Thanks for being dicks WJ, you’re making AC look good.
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