Booking airline tickets online? Be careful: This woman was hit with a $2,500 fee after clicking the wrong button

Booking airline tickets seems harder than ever. The websites can be confusing to navigate, with so many options and fees that it’s hard to keep track of what exactly you’re buying. Just ask Bailey Reid. 
On Sept. 3, Reid purchased “flexible” business class plane tickets from Ottawa to Savannah, Ga., to celebrate her father’s 70th birthday. Reid, a new mom, accidentally booked an “infant in seat” instead of the lower-cost “lap-in” ticket. When she noticed her error a week later, she called Air Canada to try to change the one ticket.
Reid’s tickets stipulated that cancellations would cost $583.99 per ticket and changes would cost nothing. Reid says she made several attempts to reach customer service to try to change the ticket, but eventually gave up, and decided instead to go ahead and change the ticket online.
But she couldn’t find the option to change the tickets anywhere. Fed up, she decided to cancel the seat and accept the cancellation fee. 
“Because I had paid extra for my tickets to be flexible, I figured this was no trouble,” she wrote in a thread on social media platform X on Oct. 7. “Even if there were fees associated with cancelling the one ticket, I figured this was manageable.”
She clicked a button that said “cancel trip,” assuming that she would be able to select which seat she wanted to cancel. But clicking that button cancelled all four of the seats she had purchased, charging her a cancellation fee of $583.99 for each seat, at a cost of $2,596.88 after additional taxes and charges.
In a panic, Reid immediately rebooked the entire trip, this time with the infant in-lap seat. She called Air Canada again, explaining what had happened. The Air Canada agent told her to file a claim for the cancellation fees, which she did, on Sept. 11.
“Frankly, it feels like a sleight of hand on @AirCanada’s part … Why (would) they (make) you cancel your whole trip, rather than offering individual seat cancellation?” Reid wrote in another tweet on the X thread.
“If you buy multiple tickets and have them on one (passenger name record) or booking reference number, you can cancel individual tickets and keep the rest,” clarified Peter Fitzpatrick, Air Canada spokesperson, in an Oct. 9 email to the Star. “But for a technological reason, because they are on one PNR (passenger name record), you cannot currently do this through our web or self-service tools. You need to call the contact centre as there is a manual process involved.”
He added in a separate email that Reid’s issues ”(appear) to have coincided with the end of (Air Canada’s) pilot negotiations and the company on the verge of a possible strike.
“At that time, we had a goodwill policy in place for all customers to make changes to their imminent travel,” he continued. “As a result, as we said publicly, the contact centre wait times were very elevated and our agents were very busy, and this may account for this customer’s experience.”
Shortly after the Star reached out to Air Canada for comment on Oct. 8 regarding Reid’s situation, a representative responded to Reid’s claim and credited her the full balance of the cancellation fees.
Though Reid’s situation was resolved in the end, it caused her several weeks of distress and uncertainty. 
Increasingly, airlines are charging customers various additional fees, such as a carry-on fee, a baggage fee, a seat selection fee, a boarding pass fee, or cancellation fees, as in Reid’s case. 
We spoke to the experts to figure out how to book flights you want, with the extras you want, without any nasty surprises. 
“I am not sure what I would have done in her place,” says Gabor Lukacs, president of Air Passenger Rights, a non-profit that advocates for the rights of air travellers. “I would probably not have pressed the button, but the website is confusing.”
“I would have possibly sent an email to Air Canada’s chief legal officer or lawyers, advising that I am exercising my right to cancel one ticket, but not the other.”
Many of the fees are quite “dubious,” Lukacs says. Airlines continue to charge these fees simply because “they can get away with it.”
Lukacs suggests that customers take screenshots of their purchase as they’re making them, in case they need to contest the charges later. Section 28 of Canada’s Air Passenger Protection Regulations notes that all fees must be disclosed, Lukacs says.
He encourages consumers not to be complacent about being charged extra fees. “These are anomalies that are turning into the new norm,” he says, “and there would be a broad societal interest to crack down on such improper means for corporations to earn revenue without providing services in return or competition.”
You may be tempted to buy the lowest advertised fare. Be careful — this base fare may only be a fraction of the total. As you go through the buying process, additional fees may accumulate. Canada’s Competition Bureau defines this as “drip pricing.” It’s considered a false or misleading business practice.
Be skeptical of the advertised price: it may not be as much of a bargain as it seems. 
“Consumers often refer to the price when comparing similar offerings or making purchasing decisions,” the Competition Bureau’s website reads. “When the represented price is inaccurate, it can lead consumers to make misinformed decisions and can result in unfair outcomes for honest competitors.”
You can avoid drip pricing by skipping through options that may appear to be mandatory, like seat selection, allowing the airline to assign you a random seat instead. Similarly, compare the different checked-bag fees. It may cost less to add a checked bag online rather than at the airport. 
Sylvie De Bellefeuille, director of legal services for Option consommateur, a consumer advocacy non-profit, suggests passengers avoid buying tickets through intermediary websites.
Purchasing flights directly from the airline or through a travel agency is generally better, she adds, because changes and cancellations for bookings made through intermediaries might be tricky. 
Air Canada’s Fitzpatrick told the Star that “for all fares (at Air Canada) you can get a full refund within 24 hours of purchase in the event you change your mind or realize you need to make a change to the booking.”
Customers should read through the conditions around the flight if they can, De Bellefeuille adds. Beware, these documents can sometimes be more than 150 pages long, written in complicated “legalese.”
The Travel Industry Council of Ontario blog suggests that travellers “pay special attention to the terms that relate to cancellation, changes to bookings and refundability,” adding that it’s important to know the exact regulations that apply to your booking. 
Before you submit, carefully look over all the information you submitted during the booking process, including your travel dates, flight departure and arrival times, flight destination points, the spelling of each traveller’s name, and the total cost of the trip, with tax, the blog continues. 
De Bellefeuille says that a summary page listing all of the costs before Reid inadvertently cancelled all the tickets may have prevented the situation.
“I believe there was a pop-up screen that said the non-refundable cancellation fee would be $570-ish per person,” Reid told the Star. 
“It did show me the total, but I assumed that by pressing confirm it would take me to the seat breakdown, and I would be able to select which seats and which part of the round-trip I wanted to cancel.”
In the end, she has her new Air Canada booking and will be making the trip to Georgia.
“While I am extremely relieved it worked out for me in the end, I do hope Air Canada makes the necessary revisions to their website so that this doesn’t happen to others,” Reid says.
“I was only able to resolve this because I have the time and ability to do so, but there are likely so many others out there who weren’t able to get these results.”