If you visited the Abbotsford International Airshow over the past weekend and purchased any merch, you may want to check your credit card statements.
A Redditor posted a warning in the British Columbia subreddit after looking at their own credit card statements.
It turns out, some folks were charged USD for prices that were marked CAD.
In the original poster’s Reddit post, they said they were impacted just after 3:30 p.m. on Sunday.
“I thought I was paying the posted price in CAD, and I wouldn’t have bought anything if I had known the price would be higher than the signs showed. If you made a purchase around 3:45 p.m. on Sunday, I can basically guarantee you were charged in USD.”
Daily Hive spoke with the original poster who said she was surprised that Abbotsford Airshow hadn’t posted anything on its social channels about the currency discrepancy.
“I actually haven’t been to the Airshow since before COVID, and as far as I know, it’s never happened before. I bought some drinks from a food truck before I bought the Airshow merch, and the food truck purchase was in Canadian dollars,” she told Daily Hive.
“I don’t understand why they would need to hire a third party to sell items at their merch booth when there are lots of Airshow volunteers that could’ve been trained to use the payment terminals and trained how to run the booth to avoid something like this,” she added.
Some folks were irked that merch was being handled by an American company at all.
“I have a hard time reconciling why a U.S.-based company is selling the Airshows merch in this environment,” one Redditor said.
“I’m sure there’s plenty of Canadian-based businesses that could’ve supported this,” they added.
Others suggested that much of what was on display was American.
Daily Hive has now independently confirmed the credit card currency reality with the Abbotsford Airshow, which has suggested a remedy may be available for affected attendees and purchasers.
According to the Abbotsford Airshow, the vendor in question was U.S.-based and was contracted to process all payments in CAD. At some point during the weekend, the payment system reverted to USD.
Now the Abbotsford Airshow is connecting all impacted folks to the vendor, Blackbird Flightwear, for remedy.
The original poster was able to get a partial refund by contacting the Abbotsford Airshow contact page directly, but Abbotsford Airshow told Daily Hive that it is directing impacted attendees to email Blackbird via service@blackbirdflightwear.com.
Some folks were able to get their money back by filing a chargeback through their credit card provider.
We’ve contacted Blackbird for more information on what went wrong.
Were you impacted? Let us know in the comments.