I hear you George, and it is very frustrating, especially if you are trying to / having to rebook on short notice!! But as you say, the same problems are happening on both sides of the border and almost all airlines, not just WestJet and Sunwing. Due to our lockdowns and last-minute rule changes, etc, we just seem to be experiencing it even worse! Besides the Omicron surge going on at the time, it was one of the reasons we postponed our trip (and flight) for early January. We had booked two one-way flights this year, so that if one got cancelled it didn't automatically cancel both.

As to waiting on hold for long periods, that has been my experience with almost all travel or telecommunications companies in the last year or so. Don't even get me going about trying to update phones, cable or internet with either Rogers or Bell!! I have experienced all of them in the last two or three months. As a retired business owner, I do sympathize with the companies to some degree, despite the amount of swearing at my end as I sit waiting! Unfortunately there is no way I could have afforded to staff my customer service lines for century-level problems either.

Many of the complaints may be fully legitimate, but others IMO are just people with unreasonable expectations given the circumstances, hence I tend to discount many of them and base things on my own experiences. IMO it just goes with travel right now when things are constantly changing. They want to get back to "normal" travel and do all the things they always did, but we aren't there yet.

By the way, when we decided to cancel our WestJet flights in December and were happy to accept flight credits, we were able to do it online. One of them wasn't done correctly, so I tried to call in. I got the option to ask for a call back for a time 3 days later. Fortunately it wasn't urgent for us, so I accepted. They did call back within 5 minutes of the appointed time and were quickly able to correct the problem. So they are trying, but it doesn't help those with last-minute changes.

How can any business be expected to keep up with increased service issues, while also suffering staff shortages and last-minute flight cancellations? I just think it's unrealistic. But that's just me! Based on observations, many of the cancellations seem due to many deciding not to travel in the first place, or changing their mind and cancelling or rebooking, including some of those doing the complaining. Then the flight is no longer viable. In any case, I don't think they are representative of "normal" service in more "normal" times, whenever those may return, so I'm not prepared to tar them with a broad brush. YMMV.

As to reducing our airlines to two from three, Sunwing was never a mainline carrier and only had a couple of dozen aircraft. Also, Canada doesn't have enough population to justify three mainline airlines. Even two is difficult. Those two are the equivalent of having 18 airlines in the US, which is roughly the current number of mainline passenger airlines in the US, and not all of them are healthy either. Three would be the equivalent of about 27 mainline air carriers in the US, with the population centres in Canada much more spread out! Not a hope in hades of three surviving. Just my take!