WestJet’s average hold time is about 12 minutes on 1-888-937-8538, but that number hides a huge range. The shortest waits happen on Thursday mornings — sometimes under 5 minutes. The longest are during weather disruptions, when Reddit threads regularly report holds over 4 hours. The airline runs the main line 24/7, but staffing thins overnight, so a 2am call can actually take longer than a 10am one. Numbers and patterns cross-checked April 2026 against third-party call trackers.
In This Article
What the average actually means
Third-party trackers put the average around 11 minutes 51 seconds — but that’s the mean across the whole week, and it’s misleading in practice. Individual waits look more like this:
- Tuesday 10am MT: 4 to 8 minutes. Lightest load of the week.
- Thursday 10am MT: 5 to 10 minutes. Nearly as quiet.
- Monday 8-11am MT: 35 to 60 minutes. Weekend accumulation hits the queue hard.
- Wednesday afternoon: 25 to 45 minutes. Mid-week mystery peak, avoid if you can.
- Weekend evenings: 20 to 40 minutes. Leisure bookings pile up after dinner.
- During a cancellation wave: 2 to 5 hours. Not an exaggeration — one August 2024 thread hit over 4 hours.
The overnight window (11pm to 6am MT) is staffed by a smaller team, so off-hour calls are not automatically faster. You’re better off waiting until 8am MT than calling at 3am. Many callers assume the opposite and sit on hold needlessly.
When to time your call
If you can pick when you dial, pick Thursday mid-morning. The gethuman tracker and WestJet customers on Reddit both flag Thursday as the easiest day. Tuesday is a close second. Mondays and Wednesdays are the worst, partly because accumulated weekend requests get dealt with on Monday and a mysterious mid-week surge shows up on Wednesday.
A practical rule: if the line isn’t answering in 15 minutes and you’re not dealing with a same-day flight, hang up and try again later. The queue has a cap, and if you’ve hit it the expected wait will only get longer. Swap to the next-best calling window — Thursday 10am if you got stuck on Wednesday, Tuesday 9am if you got stuck on Monday. It feels counter-intuitive to hang up after 15 minutes of waiting, but the math works out.
If you’re dealing with a disruption on the day of travel, don’t call at all — go to the airport. The counter agent has the same rebooking tools and a much shorter queue. This is the single biggest time-saver during a cancellation event, and most callers don’t think of it.
How to skip the hold entirely
WestJet does not publish an official callback option the way Delta and United do. You stay in the queue once you’re in it. But there are a few legitimate hold-beaters worth knowing about.
The first is self-serve. Most reasons people phone WestJet — adding a bag, changing a seat, picking a meal, downloading a boarding pass — can be done in the app or at westjet.com/help without touching an agent. Same with simple name corrections up to three characters, and cancelling within 24 hours of booking. No hold needed for any of that.
Second: social care. WestJet’s Social Care Team on X and Facebook Messenger answers within roughly 30 minutes most days, and while that’s longer than a 5-minute phone wait, it’s a lot better than a 45-minute one. You can send a DM with your booking reference and the issue, then carry on with your day instead of staring at the phone.
Third: the service request form. For complaints and compensation claims, phone agents can’t authorize anything — they just tell you to submit the form. If you know that’s what you need, skip the call entirely and submit directly. You’ll save an hour and get a ticket number to reference.
Our talk-to-a-person guide walks through the exact voicemail shortcuts if you do need to call.
What to do while you’re on hold
Put the call on speaker. Pull up your booking reference, last name on the booking, and the exact change you want, written down. Have the original confirmation email open in another tab. The average time between agent pickup and issue resolution is around 8 minutes once you’re actually talking — you don’t want to waste any of it looking up a booking code.
If you’re on hold for more than 20 minutes, call WestJet’s Twitter handle in parallel. If the social team replies first, use that channel and hang up the phone. The two queues are independent — you’re not cheating, you’re hedging your bets. Same logic applies to opening a Messenger conversation.
The short version
Expect about 12 minutes on average, 5 minutes on a Thursday morning, and over an hour during a weather disruption. WestJet has no callback option, so stay in the queue once you commit. Call Tuesday or Thursday mid-morning Mountain Time if you can choose. Use the app or social for anything simple. And during a same-day disruption, walk to the airport counter instead — the phone line is the slowest path during an irregular operations event.
Check our WestJet reservations page for numbers and booking-specific guidance, or the talk-to-a-person post for the voicemail-menu shortcuts that cut a couple of minutes off the wait.
