Sunwing cancellations leave Sask. passenger feeling less likely to fly in future

The latest round of Sunwing cancellations in Saskatchewan left a lot of people stranded at home rather than on a nice sunny holiday somewhere warm.

Over the past 48 hours, the holiday destination airline has scrapped most of its February flight schedule for Regina and half of its flights out of Saskatoon.

One of the people impacted by the cancellations was Laurie McLaren of Arcola. She was set to fly to Mexico for two weeks on Feb. 4.

While she suspected something might be coming, she says it’s disappointing to have her holiday cancelled.

Despite being annoyed at the whole situation, McLaren’s biggest frustration when the news dropped this week was trying to figure out what to do next.

“Do you cancel and just not go anywhere?” she asked. “Do you try to rebook with Sunwing? Do you try to rebook with another airline?”

Originally when her flight was cancelled, Sunwing offered her the opportunity to fly out of Winnipeg, but those options were quickly snatched up, leaving McLaren with no other choice but to cancel her trip.

She says she eventually ended up booking a new trip out of Calgary, but noted she’s not a fan of having to drive there to catch her flight.

Despite being able to fly out of Calgary and hopeful to get her holiday in, McLaren noted she’s less likely to fly places for future holidays, at least in the immediate future.

“We’re just getting to the age where we can start to travel more and we were looking forward to it. But now it’s like, ‘Will we be able to travel?’ We don’t know,” she said. “We want to go places that are not Canada, so we’ve got to fly, but it’s hard to rely on an airline.

“I think in the future a lot of our trips might just be derivable trips. We might just drive to Nashville, drive to Texas or just go and explore the States for a little while.”

McLaren was told by her travel agent that she’ll be refunded for her Sunwing trip over the next 30 days and is confident she’ll be able to get the money back.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an amended version of this story, correcting McLaren’s hometown.