Nunavut mom thankful after Yellowknife woman offered to pay for son’s airline ticket
CBC
A Nunavut mom is happy to be home for Christmas in Gjoa Haven with her son, after an airline ticketing mix-up almost left the nine-year-old boy stranded in Yellowknife.
And Millie Putuguq says she's especially thankful for another woman's generous offer to cover the $1,000 she almost had to pay to fix the issue.
Putuguq and her son Cohen were at the Yellowknife airport on Friday, en route to Gjoa Haven after visiting Putuguq’s daughter in Calgary. When they tried to check in for their Canadian North flight, they were told there was a problem.
“The ticket counter said they couldn’t find Cohen’s itinerary on the screen,” Putuguq recalled.
She says she was then told to call the airline's customer service line, where she reached a supervisor who told her the same thing: the airline couldn't find Cohen's itinerary. She was also told that she'd have to pay the full fare price of $1,000, for a new ticket for Cohen.
“I didn’t have that much funds in my account,” Putuguq said.
She says she spent an hour on the phone with the airline trying to work it out.
Meanwhile, Jane Arychuk had also arrived at the Yellowknife airport, to deliver something from her business to Putuguq, who was going to take it to Gjoa Haven. The two women had never met before.
“[I] arrived to Millie on the phone and in tears,” Arychuk recalled.
She said that Putuguq explained that the airline was not honouring a change she’d made to Cohen's ticket, and that the boy was going to have to stay in Yellowknife until Monday.
“She was very upset because her son could not stay here by himself, and was trying to figure it out with them on the phone how she was going to make it work," Arychuk said.
Putuguq told her that she didn't have $1,000 to buy another ticket to fly that day.
“So I said, 'I’ll buy it,'" Arychuk said.
"I just thought, [it's] Christmas time, we need people to be home together, and I just thought it was something I could do and make it a little easier for her, and less stressful.”
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