The president of Sunwing Airlines apologized on Tuesday to passengers who had been blocked for days and said the network outage affecting his flights was the result of a cyber attack on a third-party provider.
“Obviously, this is a terrible situation and one we did not expect,” Sunning CEO Mark Williams told CP24 in an interview. “We certainly apologize to everyone for the inconvenience.
“Our goal is to get people on vacation on time with a new plane and great service. And unfortunately, because a third-party vendor has a system outage, we’ve been unable to work the way we’d like.
He went on to say that the third-party supplier was “disrupted”, leaving the airline working “around the clock” to write boarding passes for passengers by hand.
“A system that works and works all the time, that never fails, has been hacked. They had a cyber breakthrough and failed to pick up the system.
Because of the breach, Williams said, aviation authorities in Canada and the United States want to make sure a third-party system is secure before reactivating it.
He said Sunwing was the only Canadian airline to use the provider.
He said “there is a lot of sensitive information in the airline’s system” and said “there is great interest from Transport Canada, FAA and others to find out what happened and also not to bring the system back online until they are sure it is safe to do this.”
He said he was reluctant to predict when things would work, as the provider’s updates have so far been unreliable.
Williams did not say whether information was available to passengers on the break-in.
TRAVELERS FOR BURGAT FOR DAYS
Travelers trying to board Sunwing flights continue to face hours of delay today as the disruption to the airline’s check-in system continues.
Hundreds of passengers were blocked at Pearson International Airport for much of the day on Sunday and Monday as Sunwing delayed almost all flights due to a network problem.
In a statement to CP24 earlier Tuesday, the airline said its “registration system provider continues to experience system outages”, which in turn affects its flights for the third day in a row.
About 21 flights managed to take to the air by Tuesday night.
But the statement that “further flight delays can be expected”.
By late Tuesday afternoon, a total of seven flights scheduled to take off from Pearson International Airport had been rescheduled for tomorrow.
While some flights took off on Tuesday, most took to the skies just more than 24 hours late.
“Our third-party system provider, Airline Choice, continues to work with the relevant authorities to find a solution to the system problem as soon as possible,” the airline said in a statement. “Meanwhile, as we continue to process flights manually, additional flight delays can be expected and customers are advised to check in for Sunwing.ca flight alerts.”
The cyber breach, affecting Sunwing’s check-in system, has affected flights at all airports it operates, with reports of passengers stranded in the Caribbean for days.
Some customers have expressed disappointment with the communication they received from the airline.
A passenger who spoke to CP24 on Tuesday has been trying to return to Toronto from Cancun for the past three days, but his flight has been repeatedly delayed.
He said he had already booked a trip back to Canada for tonight, but had to do so “at a significant cost” as no Sunwing flights were available.
“We got the tour. We don’t know who to talk to. They keep telling us to talk to Toronto, we talk to Toronto, and Toronto tells us to talk to the people here. So it was a complete mess, “said the traveler, whose name is Ben. “We don’t speak the language, we came here based on Sunwing’s trusted source to go to a resort and come back.”
THE PRESIDENT SAYS, PASSENGERS WILL BE COMPENSATION
Williams told CP24 on Tuesday night that there would be “some fairly significant cash compensation that everyone will receive” due to the delays, but that each case will vary depending on the hours of delay.
The airline provides hotel vouchers to passengers whose flights have been canceled, but only if their home is more than an hour’s drive from the airport. Other passengers living in the GTA are given limousine vouchers.
Williams said the airline would also allow passengers to postpone their holidays until June 23 this year if they are able to do so.
However, an industry observer told CP24 that the carrots distributed by the airline were unlikely to be the end of the saga.
“This will continue for months and months when there will be receipts and claims given to Sunwing given to insurance companies, it’s really just a big mess and the worst thing is that it’s not over,” said Martin Firestone, President of Travel Secure Inc. told CP24 on Tuesday afternoon.
“They still don’t have a conclusion on the technical problem, I suspect it will last until tomorrow or even the next day, and at that moment, who will go on a seven-day trip when they have already missed three days?” There is a good chance that they will leave the whole trip. “
Williams said Sunwing could consider changing suppliers to avoid similar problems in the future, and said he hoped passengers would try the airline again at a later date to “see what Sunwing’s real product is.”
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