This Air Canada traveller just discovered that there are, in fact, still some good-hearted people out there in the world, after a complete and total stranger offered her and her friend a place to stay after their flight got cancelled at Toronto Pearson Airport.
Kirstin Hanson told Narcity that she was heading back home to Regina, Saskatchewan on June 14 after a week-long vacation with her friend Jasmine Koshman, and the last leg of their flight included a five-hour layover at Pearson.
After getting 13 different emails about their flight getting delayed — "even sometimes it was just 20 minutes, 15 minutes" — and several gate changes, everyone finally boarded the plane to Regina later that night.
"We're waiting so we turned on our phones again off of [airplane] mode, and then I got an email that our flight's cancelled. It's like, 'Well, how the heck is that cancelled, we're on [the plane] already'," Hanson said.
Air Canada booked them for a flight two days later, Hanson shared, and the airline apparently wanted to hold and process their luggage until then to accommodate all of the passengers on the plane.
"But for us, it kind of screwed us over," Hanson said and added that they waited three hours for their bags to come out at luggage claim.
A spokesperson for Air Canada told CTV News Toronto that their original flight was cancelled "due to the impact of COVID, which resulted in the crew exceeding their duty day, a situation outside of our control", and that "regrettably" they couldn't book them in for an earlier flight.
A stranger invited them over to stay the night
"So, we go outside and we go to book a hotel and there are no hotels in the city. Airbnb, I think there [were] two, and they were like well over $1,000 a night," Hanson said.
Hanson threw the idea of even renting a car to sleep in and booking a hotel the next day to cut costs, which was when another woman sat beside them on the bench to wait for her husband to pick her up from the airport.
"She was like 'Are you waiting for someone' and we kind of got to talking to her and she was not going to let us suffer at all," Hanson said. "She's like, 'Well, would you like to come home with me and stay at our house?'"
Hanson and Koshman agreed, and not only did this good-hearted stranger and her husband let them stay the night, but she also took the two weary travellers to Niagara Falls and toured them around the place.
Hanson and Koshman at Niagara Falls.Kirstin Hanson | Facebook
Once the two displaced travellers had their accommodations sorted for the following night, the "beautiful people", as Hanson called the couple, drove an hour-and-a-half out of their way to drop them off at their hotel in Brampton and made sure that they had a room.
"They refused to accept any money from us. No money, nothing," Hanson said, and added they didn't want any social media attention for their kind actions either.
"[They] don't even realize how monumental this is and how much [they've] changed mine and Jasmine's look on all of this. Like, it was really defeating and upsetting and instead, we meet these beautiful people who take us in and just really give us a lot of help."
When Narcity spoke with Hanson, she and Koshman were waiting at their gate to finally go back home, which was scheduled to fly out right on time.
Narcity reached out to Air Canada for comment but didn't hear back in time before this article was published.
