DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­lo@guardian.co.tt

Al­though Caribbean Air­lines’ re­fund por­tal is up and run­ning, the car­ri­er is fac­ing a back­log of re­quests fol­low­ing last week’s flight can­cel­la­tions from Au­gust 19-22.

This was con­firmed by a CAL pas­sen­ger whose flight from Mi­a­mi to Trinidad on Au­gust 20 was post­poned af­ter 93 pi­lots called in sick, crip­pling the air­line’s op­er­a­tions.

The 21-year-old da­ta en­try clerk, who wished to re­main anony­mous, said while so­cial me­dia com­mu­ni­ca­tion was con­stant dur­ing the time of the can­cel­la­tions, CAL must work on re­spond­ing to queries in the af­ter­math of the in­ci­dent.

“Nor­mal­ly, when you sub­mit this, you’re sup­posed to get a con­fir­ma­tion email say­ing that your form has been re­ceived. I didn’t re­ceive any­thing at all,” he said.

The young man said his moth­er, who flew with him, was forced to reach out to the air­line via Face­book for an up­date.

Based on the ev­i­dence he pro­vid­ed, a rep­re­sen­ta­tive who iden­ti­fied her­self as Dana said: “Cur­rent­ly, the team is in­un­dat­ed with a num­ber of claims, hence the de­lay in re­sponse. How­ev­er, we can as­sure you that you will be con­tact­ed by an agent re­gard­ing your claim in due course.”

Asked if he was sat­is­fied with the state-owned air­line’s ef­forts to rec­ti­fy the is­sue, the cus­tomer said he was hope­ful every­one has the choice to have a cash re­fund, es­pe­cial­ly those who are not on CAL’s fre­quent fly­er pro­gramme.

“I find it’s ac­tu­al­ly a good move be­cause trav­el­ling now is very ex­pen­sive. We need some sort of com­pen­sa­tion for this be­sides miles,” he said.

Ac­cord­ing to a pre­vi­ous state­ment, CAL’s re­fund por­tal was launched last Fri­day, with the car­ri­er pledg­ing to com­plete re­im­burse­ments with­in 14 busi­ness days of re­ceipt of ap­pli­ca­tions.

Guardian Me­dia con­tact­ed CAL’s head of cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions Dionne Ligoure yes­ter­day, but she in­di­cat­ed she was un­able to pro­vide da­ta on how many in­di­vid­u­als sub­mit­ted claims through the por­tal. She not­ed, how­ev­er, that the team was work­ing as­sid­u­ous­ly to process all re­quests.

“Caribbean Air­lines is se­ri­ous about ser­vice, and we are se­ri­ous about the fact that we recog­nise that we have to re­build the trust of our cus­tomers. So, our fo­cus is on that,” she said.

CAL can­celled 60 flights dur­ing the dis­rup­tion, which im­pact­ed rough­ly 5,000 pas­sen­gers and re­port­ed­ly saw the air­line record $15 mil­lion in loss­es. The air­line has since se­cured an ex-parte in­junc­tion forc­ing the pi­lots back to work, which is in place un­til Sep­tem­ber 28.

The Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice (MSJ), Joint Trade Union Move­ment (JTUM) and the Na­tion­al Union of Gov­ern­ment and Fed­er­at­ed Work­ers (NUGFW) have since ral­lied be­hind the pi­lots.