TORONTO — After a three-day strike that disrupted its operations, Air Canada is offering travel advisors a reason to celebrate: protected commissions.

Speaking with Travelweek, Lisa Pierce, Vice President, Global Sales and Air Canada Vacations, confirmed that the airline will honour commissions on any booking where a customer was affected by the disruption at the time of ticketing.

“We want our agent community to feel heard and seen, and I want them all to know that we see them and care about them,” she says. “I want to express gratitude for their support through all this, especially with them working after hours on the weekend.”

Air Canada and CUPE, which represents 10,000 Air Canada and Air Canada Rouge flight attendants, reached a tentative agreement in the early hours of Aug. 19, bringing the strike to an immediate end. In total, Pierce says approximately 500,000 customers were impacted.

Air Canada flights within North America are ramping up this morning as the airline continues its operational restart. The airline resumed flights Tuesday afternoon after a complete halt that began early Saturday morning, focusing on outbound international flights to start. A full return to normal operations will take 7-10 days, with a certain number of flights needing to be cancelled as the schedule is stabilized.

However, that number, says Pierce, will be minimal.

“There may be about 40 flight cancellations tomorrow. This could change, obviously, as we begin resumption and things may happen like on normal days. But we’re getting close to normal operations – the scale and pace of the recovery is quite quick,” she says.

Exactly how Air Canada is determining which flights will be cancelled in the coming days depends on something called “flight firming,” adds Pierce.

“We need to have the crew, the flight pilots, the flight attendants to be in the right place. We need the aircraft, maintenance has to be done, planes need to be moved to gates from maintenance facilities. We have an entire checklist that we go through and once all the criteria have been met, only then can the flights be confirmed and we open them for sale and check-in,” she says.

Pierce adds that impacted travellers will be given a wider notification window than usual if their flight has been cancelled.

“As of this morning, probably in the next hour or so, we’ll know everything for today, tomorrow and the following day,” she says. “To be honest, this window is much more than in the past – it was a much tighter window before but now the window is widening for this situation.”

TRAVEL ADVISOR RESOURCES: WHERE TO GO

Since the resumption of services is a fluid situation, Pierce strongly recommends all travel advisors – especially independent counsellors – sign up for Air Canada’s newsletter, The Flash. It includes links – which went live in the early morning hours of Aug. 20 – to up-to-date customer service policies, including a goodwill rebooking policy, a goodwill refund policy, a special flight disruption policy that provides details on what advisors can rebook, and – most recently, at 6:55 a.m. this morning – a policy that allows customers to reimburse expenses incurred by booking OAL (other airline), if the OAL ticket was more than the original ticket they had purchased.

“We’ve adapted all these policies as we went along – what I tell you today could be different in an hour, which is why signing up for The Flash is so important. All these policy links get updated live,” says Pierce. “I know there are probably some independent counsellers who may feel a bit in the dark but if they subscribe to our newsletter, it will help immensely.”

Pierce adds that advisors will find information that addresses all types of customers, including those who have already been disrupted, those in the process of being disrupted, those worried about travelling because they have an upcoming booking, and those who are thinking about booking. “All four of these scenarios are very important to us,” she says. “Obviously, we deal with all of this normally as an airline, but just not at the scale and pace it’s happening now.”

Travel advisors are also being directed to Air Canada’s Agent Reference microsite and Air Canada’s dashboard for up-to-date news.

CALL CENTRE WAIT TIMES: IT’S GETTING BETTER

Travelweek heard from travel agents recently who were unable to get through to Air Canada’s call centre. Acknowledging that it’s obviously been a very busy time, Pierce tells Travelweek that the number of calls is already coming down, thanks in large part to air Canada’s flexible policies.

“The policies that we’re putting in place are flexible enough to provide customers with more options, which means we’re losing volume from the call centre. These policies help people self-serve, quite honestly,” she says. “This is one of the reasons why we changed our policies, to make them more flexible so that customers can find solutions that don’t require a call to the call centre.”

TRAVEL ADVISORS: AN EXTENSION OF THE TEAM

In her final message to travel advisors during this busy time, Pierce emphasizes how they play a “huge role,” as they’re considered an extension of Air Canada’s sales team.

“It’s really about sharing, building trust, making sure that we’re timely with information, transparent, honest and respectful,” she says. “There’s a lot to communicate over the next few days. And there are a lot more independent advisors now since Covid. There’s an opportunity for us to expand our enrollment of our newsletter because there’s a whole segment of agents who probably don’t even know that it exists – it’s a void that we’re trying to fill now.”