Sunwing Flight Delays Continue Across Canada

USPA NEWS - During an interview on Tuesday, Sunwing President Mark Williams said, “We apologize to our customers for the ongoing delays, and thank them for their patience and understanding during this unfortunate situation. The problem stems from it's reservation systems provider, which also serves other airlines, snarling their traffic as well." He added, "Further updates on the system outage will be communicated to customers as the situation evolves."

Airline Choice, is a third party company that provides a reservation system to various airlines. The platform is designed to streamline the self-service process for check-in and boarding.

In an e-mailed statement Wednesday, Airline Choice described the breach as a “data security event” that affected a limited number of its computer systems. As a precaution, we took certain systems offline to secure our environment. We also immediately launched an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the event. We have already begun restoring functionality to it's systems and will be working around the clock until that is complete."

As dozens of Sunwing flights have been delayed or canceled at many Canadian Airports, Caribbean, and other sun destinations, many stranded passengers are frustrated at the lack of communication from Sunwing resulting in chaos and confusion on the ground at the affected airports. Many passengers are starting their vacation and wondering when or if they will make it to their destination. Others are finished their vacation and wondering when they will be able to return home. Either way passengers are facing extra out of pocket expenses such as the cost of rebooking flights with other airlines, and the extra expense of unexpected hotel accommodations. Certainly a stressful situation for all involved.

Sunwing said, Wednesday, that it continues to check in passengers manually while Airline Choice works to secure the network and bring services back online.

Sunwing passengers whose flights have been delayed by more than three hours may be entitled to compensation under federal air passenger protection regulations. On Wednesday, Sunwing President Mark Williams indicated that there will be some "fairly significant" cash compensation that everyone will be getting because of the delays, but that each individual case would vary by the hours of delay.