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Leaving Las Vegas wasn’t so lucky for these tourists.
A Canadian couple is protesting WestJet airlines after a cut-and-dry flight home from Las Vegas, Nevada, nearly turned into a week-long Odyssey from hell.
“I thought this was a mistake,” Andrew Korchacov, 44, from Terrace, B.C., told the National Post while recalling the extreme jet lag. “I cannot spend a week of my life flying. It doesn’t make sense.”
He and his wife, 42, who has opted to remain anonymous, had embarked on a WestJet flight to Sin City on Monday, November 4 for a week-long jaunt. They planned to return the following Sunday via a red-eye flight from Vegas to Vancouver followed by a second trip on Monday to their hometown.
This trip would last approximately 25 hours and leave the Canucks enough time to go to work on Tuesday.
This ironclad plan fizzled, however, when the pair arrived at the airport and discovered that their flight had been canceled and rebooked.
However, the new itinerary was far more roundabout than their original route and included many more stops. First, the Korchacovs were slated to fly from Vegas to San Francisco before hopping on a second flight two hours later back to Vancouver.
They’d then layover in Vancouver for a mindnumbing 52 hours before taking a 90-minute night flight to Calgary, after which they’d fly home to Terrace the following morning.
This route would take the pair a hair under 72 hours — nearly three times as long as the original trip.
According to Google Maps, driving from Vegas to Terrace would take half as long at around 36 hours, The National Post reported.
Appalled over the circuitous flight plan, Korchacov reported to the WestJet check-in counter to voice his concerns but said he was treated rudely by the employee.
“They said ‘Well, you got your ticket rebooked … what do you want’?” recalled the bedraggled traveler. “I said, ‘What do I want? I want to get home.’”
However, when he told the staffer he’d pay more to get back earlier, they threatened to call security, according to Korchacov.
He and his wife eventually ended up dropping over $2,000 on an Air Canada ticket.
This took them from Las Vegas to Portland, then Vancouver, before they finally arrived in Terrace on Monday at 4 p.m. — 18 hours or so after their flight-mare began.
“I just did what I did” to get home, said the flustered flyer. “If I had to walk I would walk. If I had to drive I would drive.”
WestJet has since addressed the ordeal in a statement to the National Post. “We sincerely apologize to Mr. and Mrs. Korchacov for the inconvenience they experienced traveling from Las Vegas to Terrace,” an airline representative said.
They attributed the circuitous return itinerary to the fact that there was limited “availability to Terrace both within our network and through alternative carriers, making options for re-accommodation extremely challenging.”
Reps claimed that they notified the couple of the “flight disruption via email and phone” and informed them they’d be eligible for hotel and meal vouchers if “they accepted alternative travel arrangements with WestJet.”
However, Korchacov claimed he’d never heard back from the airline.
