Jack M.

Those considering using Air Canada(AC) for travel may wish to be aware of my recent experience flying the airline to Corfu (Greece) and back with two hiking buddies

After Air Canada resumed international service in May of 2021 it made five schedule changes before our June 18th departure for a 10 day hiking trip, including most remarkably a change in day of travel which resulted in the loss of a day hiking on the island, and necessitated rebooking of lodging for a number of the nights on Corfu.

Not easy to rebook on the fly for that remote Greek island.

But that is not the worst of it. Because of Canadian government and AC rules, Americans could not cross the border to begin the flight from Montreal until about two weeks before departure when AC allowed transit within the airport for connecting flights. This change enabled Vermont travelers to travel to Boston, book a flight from there to Montreal and connect in the aIrport with the flight to Athens.

Doing this, though, cost an additional $149 USD on a trip that originally cost about $900 USD and added almost two days to the trip.

Note, our residence in Burlington Vermont is only one hour 15 minutes to Trudeau airport in Montreal.

But the coup de grâce occurred while boarding the return flight from Athens on June 28th. At that point less than an hour before flight departure, we learned of a Covid test requirement to return to the US before we could leave Athens.

Air Canada obviously long knew of this requirement but did not alert us to it in the weeks run-up to departure from Montreal nor at any point on the three leg outbound trip nor on the first leg of the return trip despite multiple check-ins for boarding passes and multiple passport checks along the way.

Because of this negligent oversight by Air Canada and the need to get the test we missed our flight by hours, had to scramble to find a hotel in Athens for the night of June 28th and spend an hour on the phone to rebook a new flight on a different multiple city routing (only one available) for the next day at an additional cost of $70 per person.

Unforgiveable in my opinion.

By the way, AC charges about $11 per hour for onboard WiFi which is free in the airports it uses.

Xoom Impact on PayPal
December 21,2020

I have been a PayPal customer for many years and like the basic service very much. -- and still do.

Then PayPal acquired xoom and forced cash transfers to individuals through that company. What a complete and total disaster. I was trying to transfer $1,000 from Massachusetts to a friend in Pennsylvania, a transaction that used to take 1 to 2 minutes when PayPal was handling those transactions.

I just got off the phone after 6 hours of trying to get verified on xoom to move the money. I uploaded a passport and a scan of the required bank statement. Passport was OK, scan of bank statement not good enough (though this wasn't mentioned on the upload page). No, you have to go to the bank for the its copy of the statement, download it to your computer then upload only that version in PDF format to xoom

And I'm still not done. Another 24 hours to review documentation is ahead, not to mention delay on the receiver side.

This company does not have access to the PayPal database so has to independently verify what PayPal already knows.

PayPal's reputation is going to be greatly negatively impacted by xoom, if my experience is a guide.

Stay away from this company for cash transfers. Find another vendor that does not torture you to do a transfer as simple as this one is. Western Union comes to mind.

I have had a Coinbase account for 2 1/2 years but have not had occasion to use it to send bitcoin to others until the past 10 days. I bought some bitcoin to send to a stranded friend in China. Coinbase placed the purchased bitcoin on hold and it is still on what seems to be an indefinite hold hold even though some of the purchase was from USD in my Coinbase account. It is impossible to get timely responses from Customer Support -- which is only by online communication and e-mail, no humans available.

So my disappointing experience suggests staying away from this site if you have time sensitive business to transact.

Some Recent Coinbase Case Numbers: *******, *******