A family in Ontario, Canada missed their entire dream vacation because of a typo of a single letter on one of their airline tickets.

“This basically cost us $12,000 and we never got a vacation and we never got on the plane,” said Anthony Paoli.

The family comprising of Paoli, his wife and their three children as well as his in-laws all planned to go to Cuba but when they got to Toronto Pearson International Airport the airline said that there was a glitch with his father in law’s ticket.

Missed A Dream Vacation

“They said we are missing an ‘s’ from the first name of my father-in-law. His name is Pasquale (Ferrari), which is Pat in Italian and there was an ‘s’ missing, so it said ‘Paquale’,” said Paoli.

Because they were travelling in a group, he thought it wasn’t such a big deal and they would still be allowed to board for the dream vacation but after waiting in line and dealing with WestJet staff, they were told there was no one that was authorized to make the name change on the ticket.

“All we really wanted was a WestJet employee to update my father-in-law’s ticket by adding an ‘s’ to his name,” explained Paoli.

While waiting for the error to be corrected other people started boarding the plane and the flight took off without them.

“It’s crazy that a family of seven gets refused their vacation for such a trivial issue as one letter missing on an airline ticket,” said Paoli.

The matter was brought to CTV News Toronto who followed up with WestJet and the airline said it was sincerely sorry for the inconvenience.

“Unfortunately, some of Mr Ferrari’s travelling companions were missing documents and presented documents that were incorrect. As a result, Mr Ferrari and his family were unable to board the plane prior to take off,” said Julia Kaiser, who is from WestJet Public Relations.

“We understand how frustrating it can be when travel does not go as planned, however our airport employees did their bet to support Mr Ferrari and his family through a challenging situation, but ultimately were unable to get them to find their final destination due to the reasons listed above.”

WestJet Refund

WestJet refunded Ferrari’s ticket and provided the rest of his family with a travel credit that is equivalent to the family’s missed flights. But they still missed a dream vacation.

According to Paoli originally they were offered $4,000 in refunds and travel credits for the missed vacation but later the airline raised this amount to $10,000 in refunds and credits, which was great news for the family as they plan to use it toward a future vacation.

“We are really thankful to have this finally worked out. It’s a message to everyone to be extremely careful when booking a flight to make sure all the information is correct,” he said.

Lesson learned here is to double check all your airline booking information or risk missing your flight.

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Photo above is from WestJet Website