Travel Tips & Hacks

When people first come to Europe, they seem surprised when they find that you can get up to €600 compensation for even the cheapest flight, for it just being 3 hours late.

** CIL are not lawyers this info is for advice only**

If anyone has anything to add or if I have anything wrong, let me know and I’ll fix it.

What you need to know

EU261 is the legislation that tells airlines when they must compensate passengers for disrupted flights departing from the EU. You can get €250 - €600 compensation, as long as your flight is delayed by more than 3 hours (and subject to a few other rules).

It’s generally an easy process if you’re eligible, but there are a lot of little things that complicate it. I’ve linked the full law below, which is helpful to read if making a complex claim, but probably unnecessary for a basic one:

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32004R0261:en:HTML

Key Tips

1. You can usually make a claim anytime within 6 years of your flight, so it’s still not too late if you suddenly remember a late flight from a couple of years ago.

2. Never use a third party claims company. Their fee might look reasonable, but they will only take on the most simple claims. If your claim is complicated or will take them any more than a few minutes to process, they’ll turn you away. Hard claims ruin their “99% success” ratings, and take up too much of their time, and because they operate on a “no money, no fee” basis, the way they make money is by only taking on easy ones. If they do accept your claim, you’ll have to do most the admin work yourself anyway, and the only benefit of having them involved is that they will deal with the airline directly, for a fee of up to £150 per successful claim.

3. Some airlines have a claims form on their website, so for simple claims you just need to fill out a short form. Ryanair’s EU261 form is linked below, and others are usually pretty easy to find via Google: https://eu261expenseclaim.ryanair.com/

4. If you can’t find the airline’s claims form, or if the claims form isn’t accepting your claim, I recommend using www.resolver.co.uk. This gives you free advice, puts everything into a template for you, and sends it as a claim to the airline’s complaints department. It also keeps everything in one place which is useful if you want to lodge a dispute later.

5. Don’t trust what the airline tells you, unless they are very clear about why you are not entitled to compensation and you can accept their reasoning. When told no by the airline, most people will just drop it, even if they have a legitimate claim, saving the airline a few hundred euros. Airlines will always decline more often than they should. If you think you have a good claim, keep pushing.

6. As soon as the airline rejects your claim (or if they don’t respond within 8 weeks), if you think you still have a case, appeal it via an independent Alternative Dispute Resolution scheme. Most of the ADR schemes are free, even if your dispute is unsuccessful. My experience with them is that they’re slow and painful, but since there’s no cost, and it’s free money if you win, there’s no harm in trying, especially if you think your claim is legit and the airline is wrong. You can see what ADR scheme each airline is signed up to here: http://www.caa.co.uk/.../alternative-dispute-resolution/

What to do when you're delayed

If you’re waiting for a flight and it’s looking like your flight will be delayed, it’s worth keeping records to make sure you are ready to put in a claim when the time comes.

1. Keep receipts for food and drink you bought at the airport - reasonable expenses you have a record of will be reimbursed if departure is more than 2 hours later than scheduled.

2. If you remember, keep a list of key times, such as the time the flight took off, the time the flight landed, the time the plane got to the arrival gate, and the time the doors opened and you got off. These will all be useful in setting out your claim later.

3. Collect any evidence you can of the ‘arrival time’ - this is the time that the doors were opened and passengers were allowed off the plane (not the ‘landing time’ as airlines might claim). Take photos or videos of the closed doors, with timestamps if you’re able to, to help you prove the flight was late if the airline is arguing it was on time. More on this below.

You might still be eligible

Below are a couple of the things people don’t realise, which often result in you actually being eligible for compensation when you might have thought you wouldn’t have been.

1. Bad weather or technical reasons aren’t always an excuse for no compensation

One of the excuses airlines can use to get out of paying compensation is if the delay was caused by ‘extraordinary circumstances’. The definition of this is where the delay “could not have been avoided even if all reasonable measures had been taken”, which is fairly imprecise. Luckily, a few court cases have made it a high barrier for airlines to use it as an excuse. Extraordinary circumstances now only include issues that are entirely and genuinely outside of the airline’s control - things like airport strikes, weather closing the airport etc. Airlines have previously tried to use it as an excuse when there was a mechanical/technical issue with a plane, but courts put a stop to that, so don't let that stop you from claiming. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62007CJ0549.

Sometimes airlines might try and use bad weather as an excuse for why the delay was outside of their control. For that to be a valid argument, the weather has to have directly impacted your specific flight. If an earlier flight was delayed by weather, resulting in your flight being late to leave, you could still try and set out an argument that they should have been prepared for that by having other aircraft available. I’ve put in a claim where I thought I had no chance because there was bad weather (including snow in London), but in that case the airline hasn’t even mentioned the bad weather as an excuse. My advice is to put in a claim anyway, asking them to be very specific about the reason for the direct delay to your flight, and see what happens.

2. Arrival time is when you get off the flight, not when the plane lands

EU Courts have decided that actual 'arrival time' (when calculating whether a flight arrived more than 3 hours later than the scheduled arrival time) is “the time at which at least one of the doors of the aircraft is opened, the assumption being that, at that moment, the passengers are permitted to leave the aircraft”. This means that if you land, and are stuck on the runway or the gate for long enough to push you past the magical 3 hour mark, you should be entitled to compensation. You can't find this time on FlightAware or any of the other flight trackers, and airlines won't admit they were late, so you may need to take photos and videos for proof. It might also be worth contacting the airport afterwards - Stansted, for example, will use CCTV to tell you when stairs were connected or when passengers got off. If you find yourself in this situation, we suggest quoting the case below to the airline.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62013CJ0452

I’ve barely touched on the detail, but this getting a bit long. The main thing to remember is to claim even if you have some doubt (but make it convincing), and see what happens.