Recently, Canadian airlines company, Air Canada has been making headlines due to their treatment of a young traveler which has prompted me to question the ethics of Air Canada’s unaccompanied minor program. In an article by CBC News, fourteen-year-old Timea Vajda was forced to share a room with complete strangers after a mechanical issue caused her connected flight from Budapest to Saskatoon to delay until the following day. During this delay, Air Canada failed to inform the teenager’s parents of their daughter’s flight delay and location until Timea contacted her parents over wifi. When the parents then asked Air Canada why their daughter was unsupervised, the company explained it was because they never paid the optional fee to place her in their unaccompanied minor program, even though her ticket said unaccompanied minor on it.
Personally, I believe that the way Air Canada dealt with this situation was inappropriate and is a problem that has been caused mainly due to their unethical unaccompanied minor program. After researching on the airline’s website, I have come to realize how confusing this program can appear to potential minors and their families who are looking to invest in plane tickets. This program is available to all children between the age of 8 to 17, however, it is only free to those in the 8 to 11-year old range. That means for a majority of the ages, parents would have to pay an additional fee for their children to be placed in their program, which I believe is unethical as they are monopolizing on a portion of their customers that are expecting to be treated with due care due to their youth and vulnerability.
This situation in the article is a result of Air Canada’s policies not allowing Timea to be considered important enough to call her parents or, to take more responsibility and ownership over her. This can be related to Freeman’s Stakeholder Theory, as Air Canada seems to be focusing more on profiting from their twelve to seventeen-year-old stakeholders, than to actually uphold some Corporate Social Responsibility and protect their youthful minority.
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News Article: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/girl-stranded-1.4278323