Nearly 200 Sunwing Travel passengers stuck in Santa Maria, Cuba, landed 30 hours after they were supposed to return to Edmonton last week.
"I'll tell you when we landed in Edmonton, you have never seen happier people," said Frank Garritson from Fort Saskatchewan, Alta.
Garritson and 176 other passengers were set to return to Edmonton at 7 a.m. on Jan. 18, but fog prevented the plane from leaving Santa Maria.
Garritson said there were no company representatives on site to tell passengers what was going on. He says they weren't told the flight was cancelled until 1 or 2 that afternoon.
"There's a lot of people there. There were people with young kids. There's elderly people," he said. "We were just treated very, very poorly."
By 3 p.m., Garriston said they were put on the bus for a 2-hour ride back to the resort. That night, at 10 p.m., passengers had to check out for the 2-hour bus ride back to the airport for a 2 a.m. flight.
The airport was fogged-in again.
"Three a.m. we get on the plane. They taxi us around the tarmac for 45 minutes ... we're not going anywhere. So the plane stops," Garritson said.
"We were in that plane for three hours ... there were crying babies. There were people not feeling well. There's elderly people. It was not a comfortable situation."
Eventually, the passengers were let off the plane.
Garritson says the flight finally took off at 8:45 a.m. The plane was supposed to go directly to Edmonton, which is normally a six-hour trip.
Instead, the flight took them to Toronto, where a new flight crew was put in place for the final leg of the journey.
Fort Saskatchewan newlyweds Sophia and Adam Grossberndt were also on the flight. The flight ended off a honeymoon where the couple stayed in a room with two single beds and a dirty floor.
"I've never been happier to come back on Canadian soil in my life, that's for sure," Adam Grossberndt said. "We had no voice there, we weren't communicated with, with anything."
"I understand flights can be delayed due to weather and traffic, but when you're not communicating with people that have loved ones back home waiting for you, work or employment or anything else that suffers ... it's a joke."
"Something to go this long is very, very unusual," said Daryl McWilliams, Sunwing's vice-president of marketing.
According to McWilliams, the delay was caused by a combination of fog and Canadian transport regulations that limit the number of hours crews can work in one shift.
McWilliams says fog prevented the plane from landing in Santa Maria, where passengers were waiting. Instead, the plane was diverted to Varadero.
By the time the fog cleared, the crew had exceeded the legal number of hours they are permitted to work. That's when the passengers were taken back to the hotel.
When the plane finally took off the next day, crews had only enough time left in their shift to get to Toronto, where passengers were subsequently transferred to another flight with a fresh crew to get back to Edmonton.
"We recognize the strain that this puts on passengers, you've got some passengers with small children, some are elderly passengers, some have commitments at home, they're returning for...so it's a major hassle for the passengers," McWilliams said.
The company is offering $250 in compensation to each passenger on the flight.
"We are very sorry," McWilliams said. "The circumstances were beyond our control, obviously. We can't affect the weather."
Adam Grossberndt says the company has yet to contact him and calls the offer of $250 an insult. He wants a full refund on the trip.
"I hope that they can take this situation seriously and realize what they've put people through," he said.
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