You may be owed a fixed sum of money if your flight was delayed by three hours or more. The same applies if it was cancelled at short notice, or if you were bumped off because the airline sold too many seats. This is not a voucher, a refund or a goodwill gesture. It is a cash amount set in law, up to €600 per passenger. It is paid whether the ticket cost nine euro or nine hundred.
Most people never claim it. Airlines are under no obligation to tell you, the forms are tedious, and the rules have enough exceptions to make anybody give up. This page explains what you are owed, when the rule applies, and how to claim without paying a company to do it.
It takes a few minutes to check whether the airline owes you anything.
When you are owed something
The rule is European Regulation 261/2004, and the United Kingdom kept its own copy of it after leaving the European Union. It covers any flight leaving an airport in the European Union, Iceland, Norway or Switzerland, on any airline. It also covers flights arriving into that area on a European airline. A Dubai to Frankfurt flight on a European carrier is covered. The same route on a non-European one is not.
Distance decides the amount
Flights up to 1,500 kilometres pay €250. Flights between 1,500 and 3,500 kilometres, and any flight within the European Union over 1,500 kilometres, pay €400. Anything longer than 3,500 kilometres outside the Union pays €600.
It is per passenger, and children in their own seat count the same as adults. A family of four on a delayed long-haul flight is owed €2,400.
Three hours, measured on arrival
The clock that matters is when the aircraft door opened at the destination, not when it left. A flight that departs four hours late and makes the time up in the air pays nothing.
Cancellation counts if you were told less than fourteen days before departure. Denied boarding counts whenever you were checked in on time and the airline had oversold.
Extraordinary circumstances
An airline owes nothing when the cause was outside its control: severe weather, a bird strike, air traffic control failures, closed airspace, a security alert. That is the exception airlines lean on hardest, and they lean on it in cases where it does not apply.
Strikes by the airline’s own staff are generally not extraordinary. Neither is a technical fault, which the courts have repeatedly held is part of running an airline.
Food and a bed are owed anyway
The right to care is separate from the right to compensation and applies even when the delay was extraordinary. Past two hours the airline owes you food and drink; if you are stranded overnight it owes you a hotel and the transport to it.
Keep receipts. If nobody hands out vouchers, buy what is reasonable and claim it back.
Claiming it yourself, or paying somebody
You can claim directly. It only costs you time. Write to the airline, quote the regulation, give the flight number and date, and keep writing. If they refuse or ignore you, the national enforcement body in the country of departure will take the complaint. After that, the next step is the small claims court.
The reason claim companies exist is that this takes months and a stubborn airline is betting you will stop. They take the case on no win, no fee, and keep a cut of anything they recover. If the airline was always going to pay, you have given away a third of your own money. If it was going to fight, you have got most of something instead of all of nothing.
Two are worth knowing. AirHelp is the largest and publishes its fee openly at 35 per cent including VAT. It will take cases to court in the countries where it operates. Compensair is smaller and covers more than 150 airlines across 60 countries, including charter flights. It reports an average payout of €450. It does not publish its fee before you file, so ask about that first.
Both will check a flight for free and tell you whether there is a claim. That is useful even if you then write the letter yourself.
Before you file anything
- Keep the boarding pass
- A boarding pass or booking reference proves you were on the flight. Photograph it at the gate; the paper is the first thing people throw away.
- Write down the reason given
- Whatever the crew or the desk announced, note it and the time. Airlines have been known to describe the same delay differently later.
- The window is years long
- The window depends on which country’s courts apply and runs from two years to six. An old flight is often still claimable.
- A refund is not compensation
- Getting your ticket money back for a cancelled flight is a separate right. Accepting a refund does not extinguish the compensation claim.
- Do not accept vouchers blindly
- Airlines frequently offer credit worth less than the cash you are owed, and accepting can end the claim. Ask what the cash figure would be.
- Connecting flights
- If the whole journey was on one booking, the distance is measured to your final destination, not to the leg that went wrong.
Insurance covers a different set of problems entirely, and the two do not overlap: see travel insurance.