I booked a flight from Toronto to Houston for 8am. As recommended by AC, I arrived at the airport at 4:50am – full 3 hours before my flight was to take off. I get there, all checked in, only carry on, told everyone is to go to aisle 15 to wait until your flight is called before you can join the security line.

If your flight isn’t called yet, they reject you from joining the security line. So, I wait there are least 1h and 30 min before they call our flight to line up to security. The line is humongous and moving slowly.

We go through security no problem – not pulled over or anything. Wait forever at customs. We inform an employee that our flight is going to leave soon and we’re still in customs but we did everything right. The employee says not to worry, they’ll delay the flight because AC knows where we’re at when we scanned out boarding pass – no expedited access.

Well by the time we get to the gate, it’s 8:20am and surprise, surprise, plane is long gone. Well now there’s a nice long line at the customer service station as about 20 people didn’t get on this flight.

They offer to re book us for a 6:55pm flight – don’t offer anything else – no upgrades, no food/beverages.

So, based on this, it sounds like AC is going to blame security/customs so they don’t have to compensate us in any way.

Is there any way to get compensation from the airline or airport? We did everything right and yet the plane is long gone leaving about 20 of us to re book.

TLDR: Arrived over 3 hours early at airport, airport won’t let us into security line until 1.5 hours before. Security and customs is slow, airplane takes off without us. Any compensation we can get?