Thousands of Sunwing passengers have been stranded across Canada and outside of the country as the airline deals with a cyberattack.
CP24 reports that Sunwing president Mark Williams apologized Tuesday to passengers who have been stranded for days and said the network outage affecting its flights is the result of a cyberattack on a third-party provider.
“Obviously, this is a terrible situation and one that we didn’t expect,” Williams told CP24 in an interview. “Certainly apologize to everyone for the inconvenience this has caused.
“Our goal is to get people on vacation on time with a new airplane and with great service. And unfortunately, because of a third party provider having a system outage we have not been able to perform the way we would like to.”
Williams said Sunwing is the only Canadian airline using the provider, but that other airlines were hit by the attack as well.
The Toronto Star today (April 19) quoted stranded passengers as saying they’d been stuck for days at Toronto Pearson, as well as in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. One Sunwing customer said she had been stuck for 30 hours in the D.R.
Sunwing’s Twitter feed (@SunwingVacay) has carried a number of updates in the past day or two.
“Our check-in provider continues to experience a system issue affecting our flight operations. We sincerely apologize to all of our customers whose flights have been impacted,” the company said on Twitter on Tuesday.
“In the meantime, our teams both locally and in destination are working hard to manually process as many flights as possible, but additional flight delays are anticipated. We truly appreciate your patience and understanding.
“Please make sure to sign up for flight alerts for the most up-to-date information. We will be providing information on Twitter as it becomes available throughout the day.”
Later, the company made the following statements on Twitter:
“While our systems provider continues to work on resolving the system outage, we continue to manually process as many flights as possible but expect further delays. Please note that all impacted passengers with flight delays over three hours will be compensated.”
Visit the following link to start your compensation claim: https://sunwing.ca/en/sunwing-airlines/delay-claim…. Thank you for your patience and understanding during this unfortunate situation.”
Late Tuesday night, the company made the following comments:
“To continue supporting those who have been inconvenienced by ongoing flight delays, we are offering impacted customers the ability to make a one time change to their departure date with no fees.
“Applies to Sunwing bookings with scheduled departure dates between April 19, 2022 and April 22, 2022. Valid for travel up to June 23, 2022. System rates apply for new travel dates.”
“How to request a change: – For changes to southbound travel dates, call the Sunwing Sales Centre at 1-877-786-9464. – For changes to your return flight, contact your local Sunwing Experiences rep at your hotel.
“We are continuing to manually check in all customers until further notice, with 21 planes departing so far today and an additional 13 planned to depart this evening,” Sunwing stated. “We are also actively working with other air carriers to source additional aircraft to help relieve the backlog in certain destinations. More updates will be shared when available. Thank you for your patience and understanding.”
