Air Canada's website chatbot invented a bereavement-fare refund policy that a tribunal made the airline honor
Air Canada·Air Canada website AI chatbot
The chatbot told a customer, Jake Moffatt, that he could apply for a bereavement discount retroactively after booking, contradicting the airline's actual policy; when he later filed for the promised partial refund, Air Canada refused, arguing the chatbot was a 'separate legal entity.'
- Blast radius
- The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal found Air Canada liable for negligent misrepresentation and ordered it to pay the promised refund and damages to the customer.
- Root cause
- A customer-facing chatbot was allowed to generate policy statements with no verification against the airline's actual, static policy pages, and the company had no process to reconcile the two.
- How it was caught
- Not caught until the customer's refund was denied and he escalated to the tribunal months later.
- What changed
- The tribunal ruling establishes that companies remain liable for information their AI chatbots provide, prompting broader legal-compliance reviews of chatbot deployments; no specific technical fix from Air Canada reported.
Take-awayA customer-facing agent's factual claims need the same accuracy guarantees as your official policy pages, because courts will hold you to both equally.