Air Canada grounds Toronto family after passports are stolen

I read a strange story from the Toronto Star where a family had their passports stolen from their hotel room during an Arizona vacation last April, Air Canada assured them that their return tickets were enough to fly back to Toronto.

On their departure day, the family of four did make it through Phoenix airport security. But just before an Air Canada agent handed them their printed-out boarding passes, another agent came along — and told them it was “illegal under Canadian law” to travel back to Toronto without passports.

“Everyone was telling us their concern was U.S. customs and security letting us through,” she told the Star.

Tharmaseelan’s family isn’t the first to be unexpectedly grounded thanks to mixed messages from Air Canada staff about missing passports. Last year, a Kelowna, B.C., woman who lost her passport on an Air Canada plane wasn’t allowed to board a return flight from Philadelphia — even though, she told Global News, officials had repeatedly assured her she could.

When Tharmaseelan called the Canadian consulate about her family’s stolen passports, they told her to speak with her airline. An Air Canada rep told her that, because they’d purchased round-trip tickets, all of their information was still logged in Pearson International Airport’s system.