I’m still waiting for a reply about my lost luggage from Air Canada CEO Montie Brewer. He invites all valued customers to tell him what they really think.

Here’s another goofball Air Canada cost savings suggested in an hilarious post Dana forwarded to me penned by SCOTT FESCHUK in MacLeans magazine:

… The process is simple! Upon arriving at the airport, you go to one of those convenient electronic kiosks, stand in line behind someone who’s never used the kiosk before, sigh wearily as countless minutes of your mortal lifetime drain away, stab the clueless person ahead of you in the back with a pen, step over his bloody corpse, enter your booking reference number, watch the system crash, endure the system rebooting, stab yourself in the thigh with a pen and then print out your boarding pass and your baggage tags!

Then you just step back over the corpse (it’ll be there until Air Canada rolls out its new Self-Body-Bagging technology in the spring), attach the tags to your luggage, place the bags on a conveyor belt, fuel the jet, replace a gasket on its starboard engine, scrub the front and back lavatories — and you’re ready to sit back, relax and fly. …

Tag your own bags! Then fuel the jet!

If you hate airlines, read the entire article. It’s Hunter S Thompson funny / true.

image – Air Canada: A Review

I put Montie’s name in the title as he’s bound to have some lackey surveying the www to see what we happy customers are saying about him.

“Stand Down, Monty, Stand Down.”

I rented from one of the “discount” companies in California on recommendation from USAHostel San Diego.

A mistake.

Rent-a-Car companies already are amongst the most hated type of corporations. Their deceptive pricing offers ($15 A DAY!), vague terms and surprise additional charges are the norm.

Competition is so fierce, it’s tough to make a buck in this business.

In Arizona I could rent a $15,000 car for less than a $1000 mountain bike. What’s up with that?

Blogosphere, consider this a “Express Rent-a-Car Sucks” post. It does. I should have gone to a big name company.

My least favourite airline has gotten better over the years. But legacy inefficiency from the days of it being a “National airline”, government subsidized, are still evident.

For example, when they lost a piece of luggage recently, the system of tracking that lost bag is still astonishingly bad. Instead of marking it with a special “priority tag” and returning it to the disgruntled customer with the care of a UPS parcel, Air Canada employees hardly know any better than I do where it is.

Instead of a modern tracking system, this is what they use:

They gave me a web page for tracking my bag. But shorthand jargon used decades ago makes the site unintelligible to customers. It was not updated anyway. And was incorrect:

A phone call to their Lost luggage department is routed, as you might expect, to a call centre in India. The fellows there are sincere, hard working, polite — but they have no idea where lost luggage is located. How could they? There is no tracking system. At least 4 Air Canada luggage employees in North America admitted the call centre is only for letting customers blow off steam, not for actually finding bags.

Different Air Canada employees I talked to on the ground in North America tried to help. But notes they add to clarify when I will be in different cities, when departing, etc. seem to be lost by the next agent checking the file.

My advice is to avoid Air Canada, if you can. Other airlines could not possibly do a worse job tracking lost luggage.

After about 12 days I found my own bag by looking in the office at my home airport, Calgary, and visually identifying it myself.

It had been opened, a can of instant coffee exploded. And (I think) an electric razor was missing.

There was no accurate story given me as to what had happened to my bag. I heard several excuses, but they made no sense to me.

Air Canada still sucks.

==== UPDATE

I filed a formal complaint with Air Canada on this. Here is the template response you get after submitting online:

Thank you for contacting us. This is an “auto-response” which confirms we have received your message. Our current processing time is 15 business days for general customer concerns and 30 business days for baggage-related issues. There is no need to re-submit your information, we will do our best to get back to you as soon as we can.

The reference number for your question is ‘080301-000042’.

Ah, 30 business days. Six weeks.

Air Canada is REALLY concerned about my baggage complaint, aren’t they?

I am on an Air Canada pass right now. (Not nearly as good as it sounds, actually.)

A new round of passes are available:

This spring, enjoy unlimited travel – three days a week – for the price of a single ticket with the Spring Getaway Pass. Travel in the zone of your choice – solo or with a companion – on Tuesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, for a one-month or two-month period. Don’t miss out on this exciting limited-time offer! …

… Plus, with the purchase of the two-month option, you can get an International Sample Pass offering you a return trip to Paris, London or Shanghai this April for only $150!

Hurry! This spring offer ends on March 20, 2008.

Air Canada

Restrictions on these passes are a Royal pain, truth be told.