Travel companies refund Sask. families after non-disclosure fiasco at Mexican resort

Compensation is coming for two Saskatchewan families who went public about their treatment at a Mexican resort where they say staff pressured them to sign non-disclosure agreements to prevent bad reviews after the travellers got sick.

Last week, CBC News spoke with two Saskatchewan families who said they got severely ill at the Royalton Splash Riviera Cancun resort and were pressured by staff to sign a non-disclosure agreement before they could see a doctor or leave the property for a hospital. Neither family signed the NDA.

Since they went public, both families say they have been offered compensation from the Canadian travel companies that sold them the vacation packages.

Jesslyn Schigol said WestJet contacted her after the initial story was published. Schigol, her husband and their two sons — a teenager and a four-month-old — travelled from Yorkton, Sask., to the resort for a Christmas holiday booked through WestJet.

The company gave her family a $10,000 refund for their hotel stay plus $1,500 in travel credit for future. Schigol said that’s much better than the $200 and $500 the resort offered her before her family left.

“I’m glad that from our story coming out and people hearing about what’s going on, that everyone’s kind of getting a voice and knowing when they go on vacation to look out for this,” Schigol said.

The pile of evidence Schigol collected at the resort likely helped. Her advice for other travellers in a “sticky situation” is to document everything.

“I feel like that’s what really helped me in my situation. I had the picture of the NDA. I had the picture of the doctors. I have videos, I have email threads,” Schigol said.

“It’s really important to make sure that you have those … when you do reach out to your travel agent, to your tour company, whoever it may be, that can say, ‘This is what happened. This isn’t right. Here’s the proof.'”

WestJet declined an interview request, but provided a statement and confirmed the compensation package.

“We sincerely apologize to Ms. Schigol and her family for the inconvenience they experienced on their recent vacation in Cancun,” a WestJet spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

The travel review website Tripadvisor suspended review submissions on the resort’s page, with a note on the site as of Thursday saying it was temporarily suspending new listings “due to a recent event that has attracted media attention and has caused an influx of review submissions that do not describe a first-hand experience.”

Allison Field also received compensation after sharing her story about getting sick with her husband and four-year-old son at the same resort. The Saskatoon family booked their vacation through Sunwing Vacations.

Field said the company did not respond to her emails or phone calls after she returned to Canada.

“Then the day the story came out, I got a very long, very apologetic email [from Sunwing],” Field said. “And they just [yesterday] let us know that they’re refunding the cost of the stay at the resort.”

Field said she is probably lucky to get a refund. In the past week, dozens of people reached out to her with similar stories of their quests for compensation, and resorts pressuring guests to sign non-disclosure agreements.

“It’s not so much that they want compensation, it’s that they want either to be heard, because they have the same experience and they felt alone in that,” Field said.

Last week, Sunwing Vacations declined an interview request. In an emailed statement to CBC News, Sunwing said it had “reached out to the hotel to gather more information in hopes of finding a suitable resolution for our mutual customer.”

WestJet acquired Sunwing in 2023, but travellers can book vacation packages through either company.