buyers he is a travel expert as well as a reporter and editor for Open Jaw Network Jim thank you very much for being here with us today my pleasure now that airic Canada is planning to suspend flights potentially what should passengers be doing if they have a flight coming up well you should spend a lot of time on the internet and a lot of time on your phone because this is going to get uh it's going to get dicey I mean Air Canada flies you know thousands and thousands of people every day I think even around 100 ,000 uh Rene so this is going to get really uh really hairy for folks now the good news is uh airic Canada uh maybe a week or so ago brought in what they call a flexible rebooking policy so they are allowing people with uh tickets in any class any Fair uh type type of ticket uh to uh book rebook for free or to uh get a credit not a refund but a credit um that's valid I believe between September 15th and September 23rd Air Canada said that will be extended as warranted I haven't seen anything about that being extended but that is the policy for now so if you do have a ticket between September 15th and the 23rd my advice is you probably would want to rebook that at this point just to be on the safe side so Eric Canada says that it could gradually start suspending flights as early as September 15th uh would it cancel or suspend all of the flights would it do it uh you know sort of on a uh a caseby case basis how does this all work yeah I think there's there's people who are been earning a lot of money that are scrambling to figure that out right now Renee and they have not said they just said it would be an orderly shutdown now if you consider that our Canada has about 670 I think flight today if you wanted to do the math you know purely from you know an arithmetic standpoint you would be looking at maybe 210 220 flights being cancelled a day if they did it in that you know Progressive kind of orderly fashion they have not been revealing exactly how that's going to work but you would presume that you don't just cancel all of them the first day and you don't just cancel one or two so if you rolled it out steadily you'd probably be looking at about 200 flights a day over that three-day period so what kind of travel chaos could this all lead to it's it's it's it's unbelievable I mean you we we saw how bad it was when the WestJet uh had its problems earlier this year with that surprise situation um you know Air Canada I I think there was a potential uh accounted the strike uh in SE in uh 2012 uh then uh conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper stepped in uh it is possible that the trude Trudeau government will step in and intervene and order the the two sides back to uh to the negotiating table or order some sort of a settlement traditionally that's not the way the Liberals like to operate they like to let the the labor and and free market do its own thing uh you have to wonder what's going to happen in this case you know I mean this is just me uh I used to cover uh politics but uh you know Trudeau is is so low on the polls I do kind of wonder whether this might be something that could be seen by uh his government as something is being you know let's step in and and and make sure that people's travel plans don't be affected um then again he's far as far back as I've seen him in the polls maybe it really doesn't matter if he solves an Air Canada strike but yeah you're right I mean chaos is is is is a good word for you're looking at at least 100,000 passengers a day uh or something around 100,000 passengers a day with potential flights being canceled if all of Air Canada is not available so uh it could be really uh very very difficult for folks quite soon unfortunately I'm sure a lot of people's fingers are crossed for a a res a settlement here or for this to be resolved uh Jim byer's travel expert and reporter and editor for Open Jaw Network thanks so much Jim for being here thanks R okay