A Calgary couple is relieved to be home after a harrowing experience in the Bahamas and say they are frustrated by a lack of communication from the airline they booked the trip with.

Sandeep Aulakh and Sweety Sanghera flew into the Exumas in the Bahamas last weekend for their honeymoon.

They heard about hurricane Irma and contacted the resort before they left to see if it was still safe to travel to the area.

“They were like no, no it’s fine, we see these storms all the time. We don’t know the path it’s going to take but it could be bad, it could not be, so we’re like okay, they’re still good, we’re still good,” said Aulakh.

They thought they’d be alright as Irma was rumoured to be a lower grade hurricane at the time of their departure but they started to panic when it turned into a more severe storm.

“I think at that time it was category one and it started changing on Tuesday,” said Sanghera.

“To a three, four and five, it just started getting more and more powerful as we were watching the news and then we’re like, okay, time to get out of here,” said Aulakh. “We started making calls to our airline to see what’s the protocol, what goes on and there was nothing.”

The couple says they received little to no response from Air Canada when they asked if additional planes would be sent to shuttle people out of the area.

The couple contacted family back home who managed to help get them one of the last planes out of Nassau on Thursday.

“He said find a way to Nassau. I can’t find anything on our end so we went to our hotel concierge and travel agent and they got us on a flight to Nassau that evening,” said Aulakh.

He says the resort transferred their reservation to one of its facilities in Nassau for Wednesday night.

The couple says they called Air Canada from there three times and got no response and they were left wondering when or even if they would get out before Irma shut down the airport.

“There was no communication, no phone calls back to us, no emails, no nothing so we didn’t know what was going on so we were trying to find different paths to get back to Canada,’ said Sanghera.

“No communication, nothing until the Thursday. We were already on a flight going home and they’re sending relief planes at like two, three p.m. on the day before the hurricane’s going to hit, which to me is just not good,” said Aulakh.

Air Canada has since responded to the couple’s complaints and in a statement sent to CTV News said…

Hurricane Irma has presented severe challenges. We have been moving literally thousands of people in the last few days and we have done our best to accommodate all those seeking to travel.

Planning for and executing an operation such as this is extremely complicated. We have had to rejig existing flights and schedules to free up aircraft that were supposed to fly elsewhere so they can operate special flights to pick up people in the affected areas. As well, we had to assemble crews to operate these flights, we had to work with air traffic controllers in multiple countries to get routings and landing slots, there was the complex task of contacting thousands of customers spread all over the region to notify and book them on new flights, we had to arrange catering and fuel supplies, and there was a myriad of other logistical issues to sort out. In the end we operated 24 special flights over three days and created extra space for nearly 7,000 customers. We did all this in a very, very short period of time.

That said, customers in these situations are understandably anxious and we appreciate this, but I can assure you very early on we were working hard to ensure a safe journey home for those in the path of Irma. Unfortunately, we have not been successful reaching everyone and while I cannot speak to the efforts to transport particular customers we have done all possible to keep our customers safe and we were able to quickly move several thousand people out of harm’s way. I do not have details on efforts made to contact these individuals, but we did work with Sandals to evacuate the property, and we also arranged for them to schedule an extra Bahamas Air flight into Nassau to bring all customers back to Toronto.

The couple says the whole experience was frightening and frustrating and that there needs to be better communication between the airlines and their customers in times of crisis.

They plan to redo their honeymoon next year with another couple who they flew home with.

Air Canada says it will continue to follow the hurricane situation as it evolves and respond accordingly.