Sunwing passengers continue to experience delays

Sunwing passengers continued to face delays Tuesday as the airline blamed problems with a third-party check-in system.

"We’ve been here for hours and hours," Marguerite Fawcett told CTV News around 11 a.m. Tuesday. "We are thankfully a very patient couple."

Fawcett's Sunwing flight to Montego Bay, Jamaica was supposed to leave over 24 hours earlier.

On Tuesday morning, there were more delays.

"Waiting to check in for three hours now. Our flight was supposed to leave 25 minutes ago," said passenger Darlene MacLaren.

Sunwing said its third-party systems provider, Airline Choice, is experiencing a system outage that has affected flight operations.

"Our team has been working day and night to find alternative ways to get customers to their destination or on return flights," said a statement provided to CTV News.

As of early Tuesday afternoon, Sunwing said it processed upwards of 15 flights manually since Monday, with the goal to manually processing as many more flights as possible, subject to airport restrictions, curfews and required crew reassignments.

"Our third-party systems provider, Airline Choice, continues to work with the relevant authorities to find a resolution to the system issue as soon as possible," Sunwing said.

Jade and Nathan McDonald’s flight to the Dominican Republic was delayed about 12 hours, leaving the couple to question whether they’ll fly out of Halifax Tuesday after all.

"We have no sweet clue," Jade McDonald said.

Both complained about what they believed was a lack of communication from the airline.

"You can go on their websites, but there really hasn’t been an update at all from Sunwing directly. Any announcements or anything made," Nathan McDonald said.

"Should you book another flight? Are you going to get reimbursed for your trip? Is the flight even going to take off?" Jade asked.

Passenger advocate Gabor Lukacs believes the problem is within the airline’s control and therefore, it owes passengers.

"Mistakes happen, failures happen, glitches happen but you have to have secondary, tertiary back-up systems. You have to have contingency plans," he said.

Lukacs is urging passengers to hold onto their receipts, take notes, record announcements, and submit out-of-pocket expenses once travellers return from their trip.

"We’ve lost a full a full day of our vacation. I’d like them to let us stay another day on the other end, but I doubt that’s going to happen,” said MacLaren.

MacLaren texted CTV News to say the Sunwing flight to Montego Bay did eventually board around 12:30 p.m.

However, about an hour-and-a-half later, she and passengers were still on due to "problems with paperwork."

She credited the staff for doing all they could.

"Even though it appeared that they were understaffed, having to do everything manually was extremely time consuming," she said.