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“Air Canada staff told us they were trying their best, but said, ‘We’re not looking into hotels’ … people were starting to get quite aggressive about needing food and so we said why don’t you just pull the dinner off the plane, and they said they had to talk to customs about it,” Soldano said.

With no dinner and no hotel, Soldano took photos and posted them on social media to cheekily “thank” Air Canada for the horrible service.

“This is what dinner looks like when Air Canada screws up your flight. Also it’s served at midnight instead of dinner time.” Soldano wrote, on Imgur, an image sharing website.

Soldano, from Seattle, and Jones, from Vancouver, were then told around 3 a.m. that they were not allowed to sleep in the terminal and would have to go back through immigration and sleep in the baggage terminal.

They were given plastic mats that Soldano said were so uncomfortable they had trouble sleeping. In all, he said he got about two hours of sleep. All the shops close at 9 p.m., he added, so they had no where to buy food, except for a couple of vending machines that sold ice cream.

About their sleeping mats Soldano wrote: “Yay … just yay!”

While they kept up their humour at times, with Soldano posting that at least they were wearing comfortable socks, he noted that many others were not so jovial.

In an interview, Soldano said one woman on their flight was diabetic and she was having a lot of trouble with low blood sugar. “Luckily there were some doctors on the flight so they were helping her,” he said. “It was all so surreal.”