Yahoo Finance 'This is wrong and this is criminal': Ontario couple shocked to find their luggage donated to charity by Air Canada
'They will not change until enough people start spreading the word,' passenger Nakita Rees says about her airline ordeal
After tracking their lost luggage for four months with an AirTag, one Ontario couple was shocked to learn that Air Canada had allegedly donated their suitcase to a charity.
Nakita Rees, a dancer, choreographer, and athletic therapist from Ontario, recently uploaded a TikTok video to describe their ordeal after returning from their honeymoon in Greece.
According to Rees, they had to recheck their bags for their flight to Toronto after landing in Montreal. After arriving at the Toronto Pearson Airport, she said her bag arrived but her husband's bag did not.
"Not a problem!" she says in the video.
The couple filed a lost bag report and checked their AirTag tracker, which showed that the bag was still in Montreal.
After sitting in a storage facility in Montreal for four weeks, Rees said they finally watched their bag being shipped to a facility in Etobicoke in the GTA.
“We got really excited because we’re like ‘Oh it’s coming back to Toronto, it’s going to go to a processing facility, this is awesome,'” Rees said.
However, the suitcase remained there for more than three months.
In the meantime, Rees says that Air Canada compensated them a "quarter" of the value of the three weeks of clothes in her husbands suitcase.
"They didn't even give me the option to accept that money because they transferred it," Rees said.
The couple called Air Canada multiple times but were not successful in retrieving the bags. That's when they finally decided to check out the storage facility in Etobicoke themselves.
“We started peering through some doors with our flashlight in the public storage facility until we found the one that was piled floor to ceiling high with luggage,” she said.
"Floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall—just luggage."
After their trip, they finally involved the police and were shocked at what they saw next.
“Our luggage was donated to a charity on behalf of Air Canada because they deemed it lost even though we were tracking our luggage last for the last four months,” Rees said. “It was never actually truly lost because we know where it was the entire time.”
The police also found over 500 pieces of suitcases, with a lot of bags containing iPhones, laptops, and AirTags.
“They said they could hear AirTags beeping,” said Rees. “Cops are unimpressed with how Air Canada is handling this in that they are taking possession and ownership of our property and deciding what needs to be done with it and donating it.”
In an interview with Global News, Toronto criminal defence lawyer Marcus Bornfreund said that the "airline is not lawfully in possession of that bag. It was delayed, lost and then found."
“It hasn’t been signed over to Air Canada at any point," he added.
Following her incident, Rees is considering legal action and is urging everyone to speak up.
“Because they will not do anything and they will not change until enough people start spreading the word,” she said. “We need this to be huge because this is wrong and this is criminal. And this is my property that was donated without my consent and without my knowing.”
