When It Happens to You
When It Happens to You — Delays, Cancellations, and the Money You May Be Owed
It happened. All the bad stories. It has happened to a couple of friends, but never to you. Of course the best advice is to travel light. But sometimes it's just not the right thing to do, and then it happens to you. Your friends tell you calling the airline is possible, but not a likely solution.
They are half right. Calling is possible. What they leave out is that a good deal of what you are owed is not a favour the airline grants you at the desk — it is written into law, and it survives the shrug of whoever is standing behind that desk at eleven at night.
Two different things, often confused
There is what the airline must do for you during the disruption — food, a telephone, a bed if the delay runs overnight, and a seat on the next flight that will carry you. And there is what the airline must pay you afterwards, as compensation, for the hours themselves. The first you ask for at the airport. The second you claim later, in writing, and it is the one most travellers never collect.
Where the law is on your side
Fly from anywhere in the European Union, or into it on a European carrier, and EU Regulation 261/2004 applies. A long delay, a cancellation at short notice, or a seat you were denied because the flight was oversold can carry a fixed payment of roughly €250 to €600 a passenger, according to the distance flown and the hours lost. The United Kingdom keeps its own near-identical version of the rule. Canada has its Air Passenger Protection Regulations, and Turkey a similar scheme of its own.
The sum does not depend on what your ticket cost. A €60 fare and a €600 fare, delayed the same afternoon on the same aeroplane, are owed the same amount. What the airline may argue is that the cause was outside its control — weather, a closed airspace, a strike by someone other than its own staff. A technical fault, a crew that ran out of hours, or an aircraft that never arrived from its previous leg are ordinarily its problem, not yours.
The United States is the exception travellers find hardest to believe. There is no federal right to compensation for a delayed or cancelled domestic flight. There is a right to a prompt cash refund if the flight is cancelled or significantly changed and you decline the alternative — and that is a real right, not a voucher, however firmly the counter suggests otherwise.
The bag, which is a separate matter
Luggage sits under a different agreement altogether, the Montreal Convention, and the liability ceiling on an international journey is around 1,288 Special Drawing Rights — near enough to $1,700 a passenger. Report the loss before you leave the airport and get a written reference; a bag reported the next morning is a much harder claim. Keep the receipts for what you had to buy while it was missing, because reasonable interim expenses are recoverable, and after twenty-one days a delayed bag is legally a lost one.
What to do while it is still happening
- Photograph the departures board showing the delay, and keep the boarding pass rather than binning it at the gate.
- Ask the ground staff, politely and once, for the reason for the delay — and note who told you and when.
- Take the meal vouchers and the hotel if they are offered; accepting care does not surrender any later claim.
- Do not sign anything that describes itself as a full and final settlement, and treat an offered voucher as an opening bid rather than a conclusion.
- Keep every receipt: the taxi, the sandwich, the room you had to pay for yourself.
Claiming it, and whether to do it yourself
You can file directly with the airline for nothing at all, and if you have the patience for a web form and a follow-up letter or two, you keep the whole sum. Some airlines pay quickly and without argument. Others do not answer, and then the next step is the national enforcement body or a small claim, which is where most people quietly give up.
That is the gap the claims firms exist to fill. Compensair and AirHelp both work the same way: you enter the flight, they check it against the regulation, and if there is a case they pursue the airline in your name. No win, no fee. Compensair takes about 30 per cent of what it recovers, with a further slice if the matter has to go to court; AirHelp is broadly comparable. Both are well thought of — Compensair sits around 4.6 out of 5 on Trustpilot — and the complaints, where they come, are about how long an uncooperative airline can be made to take rather than about the service itself.
The arithmetic is not complicated. If you will chase it yourself, chase it yourself and keep all of it. If the letter would sit unwritten for a year — and for most of us it would — then seventy per cent of something is a good deal more than the whole of nothing.
One caution worth having: the right does not expire the week after. Depending on the country, you generally have between two and six years to bring a claim. That flight last spring, the one you are still annoyed about, may very well still be worth filing.
Keep the boarding pass. Photograph the board. Then claim it when you are home and rested.
Practical notes
Claim services and flight search partners are listed under Flights and When Flights Go Wrong on our Resources page. If the disruption strands you somewhere unplanned, The Last Ten Miles covers getting from a terminal to a bed at an unhelpful hour, and Staying in Touch covers keeping a line open when you need one most.
