To ask your views - holiday / compensation

[dadap]

My brother paid for airline tickets and visas for 12 of his family members to visit relatives. ( including in-laws) to cut a long story short - travel was horrendous where they cancelled our flight and we ended up being passed to a different airline arriving a day later and spending 15 hours just hanging around airports. We are due compensation. Do you think compensation should go to my brother as he paid for everybody originally or that it should go to individuals. My reason for asking is that one in- law wants to make a claim on her own insurance which means it would go direct to her. Whereas I had just assumed we would claim direct with airline and any compensation if cash could go back to my brothers card that he paid with. Your views please - thanks

Here is the relevant law. Note, reference is to the passenger, not the booking party.

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

Some travel insurance policies do allow you to claim from them in addition to any EU261 payment. My policy does, albeit a very low amount, something like £25 for every 12 hours.

Which airline and route is it OP, and the reason for delay?

Why did your brother pay? Is he much wealthier than everyone else? How much were the flights in comparison with the compensation.

Unless brother is very wealthy and the flights were pocket change to him, I'm thinking the fairest thing would be to split the compensation so that he gets most of it, and everyone else gets some as a token for their inconvenience. Say the compensation is £400 pp, brother gets £300, everyone else gets £100 each, or 50/50 would be fair too. It's a nice amount to buy a treat and brother gets a contribution towards his huge airfare bill.

It should go to the person who paid if they wish to claim. For a delay of less than a day it wouldn't even occur to me to claim.

You're entitled to quite significant compensation under EU rules IceCream. Why wouldn't you claim?

They haven't provided what you paid for and there could be knock on effects - loss of part of holiday, disruption to business, etc.

If it's coming from the airline, it's compensation for the delay payable to each passenger and is in no way linked to who bought the ticket or how much it cost, rather it is fixed based on the distance travelled and length of the delay.

It might be different if it was a refund for the ticket, but it isnt

Plain speaking
She can claim on her insurance (this is why she took out a policy) and Dbro can claim on his. Im not seeing the issue here. The other people can either also claim on their own policy or learn the abject lesson to take out insurance in the future.
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All persons were equally inconvenienced*.

We are all insured and always take out holiday insurance. I just didn't see why you claim under insurance when airline are offering compensation - I think you deliberately misunderstanding or are just trying to be offensive under the guise of "plainspeaking " however thanks for your words of advice!