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With the pandemic coming on and countries shutting down, and my wife and me in rural France, I booked tickets on a WestJet flight back to Canada for March 24^th, the earliest flight available.  A few days later, I read on the CBC News site that WJ had abruptly canceled all flights after midnight on March 22^nd.

When I saw that, I asked my wife, whose credit card we had used for the booking, to see about getting the money back.  But the bank said WJ was contesting any refund, saying their terms and conditions required them only to provide us with vouchers on future WJ flights.

But the bank also confirmed that the airline had taken the money only after the cancellation. 

WestJet took money for a flight that they knew was never going to happen.  I call that fraud.

Now I have received an emailed notice telling me that I have “WestJet dollars” credited to my account, and I can use them for WJ flights any time over the next two years.

It’s entirely possible I’ll do that, if I have to fly somewhere, to recover sunk costs.  But once that credit is used up, I will never, ever, fly WestJet again.

And I recommend that no one should.

My wife and I are in the basement suite of a friend on southern Vancouver Island, self-isolating and waiting to see if we’ve got the bug. Chances are unlikely, since we were previously isolated in a little French hamlet of three or four houses and only went out for groceries. Traveling here, we might have been exposed during the two plane flights and a taxi ride, but we’ve been hand-washing and wiping down. So we’ll see.

If we are contaminated, and it’s a threat, we have access to world-class health-care at no charge. Plus, the friend who’s sheltering us is a doctor.

I’ll write up the full adventure of fleeing France – plenty of twists and turns – in the next episode of my autobiography-in-progress, One Damned Thing After Another. If you’re not seeing those, please fill in the form in the upper right corner of this page.

Soon, I’ll get back to work on Barbarians of the Beyond, the sequel to Jack Vance’s Demon Princes quintilogy. And we’ll spend the summer up in Prince George, as we have the last three years.

All shall be well (that’s a recurring line from Barbarians).