Authors note – The following article “WestJet: Vancouver to London” is satire and is definitely not sponsored by United Airlines to distract from the beating incident recently.

WestJet: Vancouver to London

Without my stilettos on, I’m six feet and four inches tall. Yup, I’m a tall bugger. So when I fly, I cry. Modern airliners are getting smaller and smaller, perks are getting less and less and cabin crew are getting surlier and surlier. Ask Mrs VancouverCoffeeSnob and she’ll tell you that when you stuff me into a steel tube full of other people’s bad breath, I’m not a patient man.

But wait, Canadians are friendly, they’re efficient and they’re generous! WestJet to the rescue perhaps?

WestJet: Vancouver to London, what have you got for me?

Venue

Due to my lanky stature, I decided the best thing to do would be to book the full price flight, then add on a large legroom seat at extra cost. WestJet happily took my money for this (after all, how else are they going to pay their CEO almost $5 million per year) but when I got to the seat, I noticed a great big wall in the way of my ‘extra leg room’:

I have a healthy sex life already thanks WestJet, I don’t need to be shafted by you too, but thanks, it’s nice to know you find me attractive.

In addition to this beautifully scenic wall, the seat fell apart, THREE TIMES on my flight. Firstly the arm rest:

Then the headrest (twice):

But it’s OK, WestJet, I’m an engineer, I can fix it for you. I wouldn’t want you to pay someone to do it and eat into your $4,000,000,000 (that’s billions) yearly revenue

“Chin up VancouverCoffeeSnob”, I hear you thinking, “just watch some in-flight entertainment and you’ll be fine”. YOU FOOL! Don’t you know that TV makes your eye sight bad and your brains rot? I can only assume that’s why WestJet broke their in flight entertainment:

Lastly, because these seats are close to the bathrooms, which were not ventilated, the whole area smelled of urine. I’ve always thought that bathrooms in Canada were not nearly as dirty as a good, grubby pub bathroom in the UK, so this was a nice touch to prepare me for my trip.

Coffee

Filter Coffee. Price: your dignity

Smoking has been banned on flights for decades now, so it’s incredibly generous of WestJet to add the flavour of tobacco to their coffee. “But wait”, I hear you cry, “Surely I could just bring my own cigarettes and steep them in the coffee myself?”. WestJet have got your back, my cancerous friend, because they burned the tobacco before adding it to the coffee!

Food

Shepherds pie. Price: Twelve Pints of O-Negative Blood

Shepherds pie is traditionally made with ground lamb, but WestJet doesn’t play by the rules when it comes to ground animal based dishes. Why? Because f*ck you dirty sheep herders, that’s why.

This is the screen shot from the WestJet website:

This is an artist’s impression of the actual result:

For your culinary pleasure, they use only the finest beef lips and a**holes for this concoction, which perfectly compliments their smooth potato dust-paste smeared on top. Eating this was like being made love to my an angry gorilla. Make it stop. Please, just make it stop.

Staff

To be fair – when the cabin crew for our section found out that I was stuffed into my expensive seat like a sardine in a leotard, he did try to find me another seat. Unfortunately there were none to be found. He apologised and promised me that my seat would be refunded by the support team. Here was their response:

Ah, I get it! This was his way of getting me to put a stop to any further annoying questions I might have and give him time to sit in the back reading his book. Fifty shades of psych.

Location

There is NO escape once the doors are shut.

Bathrooms

Weddings. I freaking love weddings. Yet another win for WestJet, as the bathrooms were full of confetti!

I can only assume that half the passengers the plane got married on that flight, as the longer it went on the MORE the confetti accumulated. Sadly I missed all of the ceremonies, but that’s on me – I turned down butter with my dinner roll, which I could have lubed myself up with to get in and out of my seat in a more timely manner to catch the vows.

Conclusion

OK, real talk, Westjet: Vancouver to London was a disaster but I do actually quite like WestJet for short domestic flights. It just seems that any time you extend the flight over 5 hours, all hell breaks lose. They’re just far too green and amateur to be a decent option for long haul flights, in my opinion. When you experience service on airlines like Lufthansa, British Airways or Emirates, you can really see what that small bump in price gets you. When you’re as tall as me you’ll never fly long haul WestJet again.

As a side note – I gave WestJet plenty of opportunity to make this right. They turned down my request for an upgrade on the flight back (I thought it was worth a try). They offered a refund on the plane then denied it once I’d landed. They offered free food and drink to compensate (I assume) but then charged me for it (and came up with a lousy excuse as to why afterwards).

The best I got was an offer to refund $20 of my booking fee.

Oh well, at least they’re not Air Canada.

Artists impression of WestJet customer service training.

Summary Reviewer Vancouver Coffee Snob Review Date 2017-05-25 Reviewed Item Westjet: Vancouver to London Author Rating 1

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