AVOID AND BOOK ANYWHERE ELSE!

I booked a vacation for my family of 4 (myself, husband, 2 young kids age 7 and 10). I am writing after I tried to submit a claim under flight delay and was told that my claim is invalid. Here are the facts:

- My flight was scheduled for July 27 @16:45

- 1st Delay to 21:45 that same day (5 hours later) due to staffing issues

- 2nd Delay to 08:00 on July 28 (one day later) due to technical/safety issues

Although I can appreciate that the second delay was due to safety, the first delay was due to staffing issues which is unacceptable and within the control of Sunwing. We spent over 5 hours at the airport just waiting with one delay after another.

To make matters worse:

- After we were offloaded from the unsafe flight, we were required to wait for our luggage which took over an hour

- After retrieving our luggage we were required to wait in line for another 1.5 hours in order to get a taxi voucher. By the time we got home, it was almost 1am.

- We were required to be back to the airport the following morning by 4:30 am (per their employees). This meant that we got 3 hours of sleep (at most) and this is how our "Wonderful" vacation was to start

- We finally got on the flight the following day and upon arrival at the hotel at around 3pm, we were advised that they could not find our room booking. This was strange since I would have expected Sunwing to have advised the hotel of this delay since we purchased a vacation PACKAGE. But it appears that we did not have rooms. It was another 2 hours until we were situated in rooms.

As you can tell from the above, our first (but really second day of vacation) was a complete write-off. We were sleep deprived, tired, stressed and in foul moods. Keeping in mind that we went through all of this with 2 young children. We were so exhausted by the time we were in our rooms, that we just slept. That is 2 days of vacation gone.

After all of this, Sunwing's response was: Sorry, nothing can be done for you. Had the flight not been delayed in the first place due to lack of staff, we would have found out at 4pm that there were issues and things would never have been as awful as they were. They DO NOT take responsibility for their issues at all. USE ANY OTHER AIRLINE!!!