Days of delays breeds frustration in Sunwing passengers

It is delay déjà vu for two couples passing time at the ALT Hotel next to the Halifax Stanfield International Airport as they wait for the second day in a row to see whether their Sunwing flight will take off.

Instead of lounging by the pool, they played a game of pool — checking their phones constantly for updates.

“Just stressing pretty much. Not knowing what to do if we should go home, if we should stay. They’re delaying us continuously by small increments,” Jade McDonald said.

They were supposed to leave for the Dominican Republic yesterday, but are grounded by a network-wide disruption. Sunwing blames delays on a cyber-breach of its check-in system operated by a third party.

“They have made some explanation. I don’t think they were really clear cut and have said this was 100 per cent what the actual problem was,” Nathan McDonald said.

David Shipley, CEO of Beauceron Security, says it’s not clear whether customer information was lost. What is clear is the company can’t use its IT system.

“This has all the hallmarks of a ransomware attack. We don’t know that for sure. We’re waiting for details to emerge,” said Shipley.

“If it’s not deemed to be a criminal ransomware attack, and simply been a disruptive attack against this, it’ll be interesting to see what we learned or we don’t learn from the company depending how much it chooses to share with us.”

Whatever the cause, passengers want compensation.

“There’s a lot of people who’ve spent a lot of money on these vacations. People save years to go on these vacations,” Jeff Towriss said.

The group claims communication between the airline and its passengers has been terrible.

With no update from the airline, they called the airport in Montego Bay themselves to make sure the plane that’s coming to pick them up and take them to Punta Cana is on its way.

“Talk to your passengers. Let them know what’s going on. If we are delayed 24 hours, let us know like don’t keep us here and change our flight by hours,” Jade McDonald said.

Sunwing says passengers who’ve faced delays more than 3 hours will be compensated with cash.

As of late Wednesday afternoon, it was still checking in passengers manually and had sub-chartered planes from other carriers to pick up passengers to help.