So again I have seen a few people on Facebook bitching about Air Canada and their “horrible” service. Every time I see one of these people I wonder what happened. I’ve been flying with AC for years and have had very few issues with them.
I decided to do some digging of my own and as it turns out, Stats Canada has some really cool information on airlines.
This link provides you stats on both AC and WJ. This gave me the exact information I wanted so I could try and prove and emphasize a point.
According to those stats, if you add up all of the passengers flown by AC between February 2015 and January 2016, you get 28,489,000 (approximately). For WJ, it’s 20,401,000 (approximately). 28.5 million people flew on AC and 20.5 flew on WJ. Those huge amounts of numbers when it comes to air travel.
Let’s look at that number again. 28 and a half million people flew on Air Canada during that time period.
Let’s now assume that 2%, a relatively small number of people, of those travels had a horrible experience. That translates into 569,780 people. That’s a hell of a lot of people who are pissed off at AC. I wouldn’t want to be in a room with all of them together.
But, let’s not forget the people who did fly with AC and had no issues. That’s a much larger number: 27,919,220. Just shy of 28 million people flew without a problem.
Of those two groups of people, who do you think you’ll hear from more often? That’s right, the people who are mad and pissed at the airline saying “they suck”. You don’t hear good things because most of the time people don’t share their good experiences with airlines. It’s always the bad.
Now, maybe 2% is too low. Let’s jump that number up higher and assume that 1 out of every 10 passengers during that time period got screwed. That’s a big leap but let’s use it as an example. That means that this time, 2,848,900 passengers think AC sucks. That also means 25,640,100 passengers don’t think that bad of AC.
Again 2.8 million vs 25 million. Who will be the more vocal?
The exact same logic can be applied to Westjet. If you apply these exact same numbers against WJ, it would still mean that by far and large, most WJ customers are happy. You just don’t hear from them. We only hear from people who bitch and whine about how they got screwed because the airline sucks.
I know this won’t change people’s minds and it won’t magically make people stop complaining about airlines. But I do hope that you can see that it’s purely a numbers game and sometimes they work for us, and sometimes they screw us. That’s just life. Learn to live with it.
