Travel agents left feeling full brunt of Sunwing cancellations

Sunwing’s latest announcements of flight cancellations in Regina and Saskatoon isn’t just leaving passengers frustrated, but travel agents as well.

Since the Christmas break, when Sunwing announced its first wave of cancellations for Saskatchewan, many agents have been working long days trying to get their clients trips rebooked, on a flight home or refunded.

Jamie Milton is the president of Uniglobe Carefree Travel in Saskatoon, which also has locations in Regina. She was asked to describe the last month.

“ ‘Chaos’ is an understatement,” Milton said Wednesday. “It started with all the Christmas cancellations, which resulted in every travel adviser working right through Christmas (and) missing out on their own holidays (while) trying to get clients where they needed to be.”

After travel agents thought they were out of the Christmas chaos, Sunwing then decided to scrap flights from the province’s cities to sunny locales. That has led to agents working long and stressful days.

“There’s advisers here who haven’t had a day off in a month because they simply can’t afford to,” she said. “They’re trying to help their clients. The emotional toll and burnout is really starting to take effect.”

Milton noted some agents were working 12- to 18-hour days dealing with the fallout of the Sunwing cancellations.

Milton says thousands of her firm’s clients have been impacted by Sunwing and about a third of them have been refunded since the first wave of announcements.

She added what is making this extra stressful for travel agents is the fact that their commission from the sales they’ve made isn’t protected by Sunwing.

“When this is happening, Sunwing is saying to us, ‘We understand you’re doing all of this work for us, but we are not going to be protecting your commissions,’ ” Milton said.

Milton feels that travel agents are being undervalued for the service they provide and says these decisions are hurting agents across the province greatly.

“I know some advisers that worked for me on a commission basis (and) they’re looking at losing a third to half of their annual income at the same time as losing time with their families,” she explained. “That’s really unfair.”

She says Sunwing gave them a 15-minute heads up about its Regina cancellation announcement on Tuesday.

Milton has been in the industry for 25 years and said she has never seen anything like this before.

She blames Sunwing and its inability to plan for the winter season as the reason why cancellations are happening across the province.

After Sunwing’s announcement about Regina on Tuesday, some travel agents took to Facebook to say they won’t be offering Sunwing packages at least for 2023 and into 2024 in some cases.

While Milton’s company hasn’t made that decision as of yet, she says that will be something it will consider if Sunwing doesn’t do what is right.

“It’s a fluid situation and we’re seeing how things pan out. If the compensation piece doesn’t come through from Sunwing and if the efforts that we have put in aren’t recognized, Sunwing won’t be somebody we would actively promote,” Milton said. “We would try to discourage the sale and find alternatives for clients that we are a bit more confident in.

“We hope, though, that Sunwing will see the impact this is having not just on the consumers but also the travel advisers in the industry in general and that they will do what they can to make this right,” she added. “A lot can change within a year, so we don’t want to make any fast assumptions at this point. But it’s something that we’re looking at.”

Milton wants an apology from Sunwing directly to travel agents as well as every penny of commissions to be protected.