Tens of thousands of summer travelers were left scrambling for options as Air Canada flight attendants walked off the job early Saturday after failed talks to resolve a bitter dispute with management over their wages.

The airline said it had canceled 700 flights, expected to affect about 130,000 passengers daily. But the shutdown of Canada’s dominant airline had ripple effects well beyond Canada’s border.

At Toronto Pearson International Airport on Saturday morning, a few dozen Air Canada employees were picketing in front of the departures terminal. Inside, hundreds of people whose flights had been canceled sought answers from airline employees about alternative travel arrangements and what their rights were.

The airline has been sending cancellation and rebooking emails, many travelers said, and had asked people not to show up at airports. At Pearson’s departure and arrivals terminals, the atmosphere was calm and the crowds smaller than usual, even as people tried to find other ways to complete their journeys.

Rob Van Helden of the Netherlands had been on vacation in Costa Rica as part of a group of 16 family friends — eight of them children — and was flying to Amsterdam through Toronto when the strike began.

The group stayed at a hotel Friday, and some of the adults were at Pearson airport early Saturday trying to work out their options: Air Canada had booked them on a flight on Aug. 20, he said, which meant four more nights paying for accommodation in Canada.

Mr. Van Helden said the group had “almost forgotten” about the Costa Rican holiday because of the travel stress, and was looking into paying about $600 a person to fly to Detroit and then to Amsterdam on KLM, the Dutch carrier.

For Heidi Cesare, a New Yorker wrapping up a week’s vacation with her daughter on Prince Edward Island before dropping her off at college for her freshman orientation on Aug. 20, getting home to Brooklyn was key to smoothly pulling off a landmark moment in her child’s life.

She was scheduled to fly to Montreal and then to New York on Sunday, but those flights were unlikely to materialize, even if there were a breakthrough in the strike talks on Saturday.

On Saturday morning, Ms. Cesare was trying to work out alternative routes off the beautiful eastern Canadian island province, including, if necessary, driving back to Brooklyn.

Some 10,000 flight attendants, 70 percent of whom are women, were participating in the strike through their labor union, seeking improved compensation, particularly for the hours they are working but not airborne. As things stand, Air Canada flight attendants are paid an hourly wage only once the plane has taken off and only until the flight lands, a formula they say is unfair. In recent years, some major U.S. airlines, including Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and Alaska Airlines, have changed this remuneration policy.

After talks broke down and the flight attendants’ union filed a notice of their intention to strike, Air Canada began preemptively canceling flights on Thursday.

The airline had said it would attempt to rebook passengers on other carriers, but the summer travel period and a lack of capacity on its smaller domestic competitors was already making that difficult.

The strike does not affect about 300 separate, regional flights generally offered on small propeller planes that are operated by two small carriers under contract to Air Canada, the company said.