PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT - Make sure to claim for your flight delay!

[tellmewhentheLangshiplandscoz]

Morning all

Just wanted to remind everyone that under UK law (think it's originally law we benefited from whilst in the EU but it's one of the few things that remained in our favour post the shit show that was Brexit) if your flight is delayed or cancelled and delay is 3 hours + all travellers are entitled to compensation regardless and of flight/holiday cost.

We've just had £ in our bank this am from TUI following our flight home from Naples a few weeks ago being delayed then cancelled (flown home following afternoon).

Factors that determine the amount are -

How much notice you had,
Distance your flight is, and
How long the delay was (calculated up until aircraft doors are opened in landing )

Flight has to either leave from or land in EU or UK airport and cannot be due to circumstances beyond operatiots control.

Anyhoo ... definitely worth checking on operatiors website. Link for CAA authority below too.

My firm with TUI took 5 minutes to fill in and no paperwork or docs to support needed at all.

My claim for my lost case however

https://www.caa.co.uk/passengers/resolving-travel-problems/delays-and-cancellations/delays/

Bump

Just to add one important point, you only get compensation if it's the airlines fault (eg overbooking or aircraft broken etc). You won't get it for bad weather cancellations or french air traffic control strikes etc.

Yup absolutely so only if it's something within airlines control

My DS is still pursuing a claim with Ryanair from before Christmas.

flight from Berlin was delayed by approx 50 mins. but plane got to the end of the runway to take off then the airport said they couldn’t depart due to time/noise.

Delayed til next morning at 6am. No food etc offered. Off airport hotel offered but you had to pay your own transport to get there. It was a 40 min journey, so not worth the hassle.

ryanair denying responsibility, however, if flight had taken off on time, there would have been no issue.

he’s gone through the ombudsman, but still no decision been made.

any advice?

That's shit Moo ** it sounds like they were at fault. Sorry no advice, I wanted to post to prompt others to be aware (sounds like someone is worse than TUI ).

Have you tried the Civil Aviation website? May be advice there?

www.caa.co.uk/passengers/resolving-travel-problems/delays-and-cancellations/making-a-claim/what-to-do-if-your-claim-is-rejected/

Crux may be the reason for the initial 50 minute delay and whether was in their control or not

Hi - if anyone can advise - our flight has been delayed for over 4 hours - it was meant to fly at 2.20 today - with Wizz air

we initially got a message - to say it’s slightly delayed as we were checking in our luggage this morning around 11. However
they had no details of the flight ag 2.30 - but the flight that was due fly at 3 to same destination was still scheduled on time!

finally we were allowed to board around 4.30 but told by the pilot that they had some problems around airspace and they were trying their best to resolve the issue but they estimate flying around 6.15.

we’ve just received another message 15 minutes ago - from the pilot to say now the delay is due to bad weather over Germany.
this wasn’t mentioned before and wouldn’t explain why the later flight stil left on time.

my 3 kids are fed up, hungry, they’re finally offering a snack - but havnt got around to us - especially autistic ds who had to be persuaded to agree to go on holiday/ also this has had an impact on charges on our car hire/ villa charged for late arrival.

Im suspecting that this new information of weather may be because it then doesn’t allow anyone to claim compensation.

if anyone has read all the way and can offer any advice I would greatly appreciate - sorry for hijacking thread!

No apology necessary and that sounds like a nightmare with the little ones.

Try checking the CAA pages for what you are entitled to and any compensation possible later ... sorry, I'm unsure myself as it's only happened (touch wood) to us once . I just hoped to spread the word a bit as I had no idea myself

Hope you get on your way soon

I think it will all depend on y reason for the initial delay too. Other factors like fly slots and weather have impacted since but if they are responsible for the delay initially I'd think you have grounds?

It explains why on a delayed jet2 flight back to Manchester once we practically pulled up at the end of the runway and opened the doors to ‘air the plane’ long before the stairs arrived.

I remember working out the delay was 2h 52m but didn’t realise the cut off was 3 hours.

I claimed for a delayed easyJet flight recently, and got £1750 compensation. Worth doing.

@AdvicePleas

Hopefully you are travelling or have travelled...

In no particular order to address a couple of points:

I'm suspecting that this new information of weather may be because it then doesn’t allow anyone to claim compensation.

There genuinely have been problems due weather (specifically Thunderstorms) over Germany and elsewhere over central europe today - it's still the case this evening (more of that in a moment).

the delay is due to bad weather over Germany. this wasn’t mentioned before and wouldn’t explain why the later flight stil left on time.

Depends when the slots for the two flights were issued..once you delay and lose a slot it's sometimes takes ages before you get back into the sequence. It's unusual but yes you can on rare occasions get overtaken by later departures.

For the sake of delay watchers for info Eurocontrol have a public site, there's a little map on the top RHS of the first page labelled "current network situation" that gives an indication of the state of delays around europe..there's other more detailed info tucked away in the box to the left of that map under the label "tactical update" but you may need know bit of aviationspeak to decode some of it:

https://www.public.nm.eurocontrol.int/PUBPORTAL/gateway/spec/index.html

It has been a nightmare - the flight was delayed just over 5 hours - we have not yet arrived at our destination.
They started to offer snacks and drinks - but the air host stopped before she got to us and then they said they would return and never did!
my Poor ds - who has autismhad to persuaded that this was only going to be a 4 hour flight, sobbing as it was all too much:

it has also meant that we will also incur late charges at the villa as the poor host has had to stay up for us.

the whole reason we paid extra to get this flight time was to avoid the
children arriving extremely late.

there was no mention of why they were delayed initially, - for 2.20 they then obviously lost that flight time- and I think it was agreed for 6.45 -
to mention bad weather at 5.30
seems stange - especially because that’s not the reason for the original delay and they managed to fly at exactly the time that they said they would try to leave for?

@AdvicePleas

DS was flying EasyJet from Gatwick yesterday evening but the app had warned us about 3pm that Gatwick had suspended operations due to bad weather and delays were to be expected.

Many flights had stacked up in the meantime and so his flight ending up leaving 2.5 hrs late and arriving 4 hrs late and having been diverted to a different airport.

As it is clearly due to weather, I suspect that the only compensation due will be the extra taxi cost from the airport diversion.

@AdvicePleas

Hi

Hope you got to destination.

Looking at various sources this morning there were widespread delays to many across a lot of Europe from yesterday PM onwards until well into the night due to the large band of thunderstorms that crossed the continent. That fed back into delaying a lot of departures from a few UK airports and a lot in mainland Europe. As a result I'm not sure it's worthwhile challenging the portion of the delay apportioned to weather.

What other flights did last night isn't always a great indicator of what or what is not possible on your flight either; certainly if a company can get one flight away on time it will do so; it's hard/(?impossible) to slot swop to help another delayed flight out and in any event the company won't risk delaying two flights because amongst other things that's potentially two lots of compensation.

The key to this is obviously the original delay and as you know it's often very hard to find out the reasons for that.

Fingers crossed the rest of the holiday goes OK.

Or a bumble bee stuck in the air speed indicator.
this happened to us 4 years ago
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/plane-circled-over-merseyside-after-16294050

We were supposed to be on the return flight, which was delayed to the following day as the captain would have exceeded his flying hours. Tui handled it brilliantly and out all the passengers into a hotel for the night.

Hmmm wonder if it was the same flight 😂 I'm a £1000 richer this week

I’m not sure opening the doors gains anything in those circumstances, unless after the doors were opened they were then closed again and the aircraft continued taxing to the terminal.

For info in simple terms the arrival time logged (usually automatically) is the last time the parking brake is applied.

Thanks for this thread. Was on easyJet flight delayed approx 4 hours yesterday. Largely once we were all sitting on the plane. Blamed on bad weather in Europe but was also becuase once they had missed the original slot (due to arriving late) then it took 2.5hrs to get a new one. Not sure why they were late originally so might claim.
Circs were outside the control of the airline but not providing food/water to lots of kids until challenged and not providing info on compensation was within their control!
Everyone clapped when we finally took off

I think people expect too much of a mode of transport that basically entails sitting hundreds of people in a pressurised metal tube and firing it through the air 6 miles above the ground at several hundreds of miles an hour, dodging each other and all manner of weather, culminating in the expectation that it will neatly land on the same 45m wide strip of tarmac (even when the pilots can’t see that tarmac) that everyone wants to land on.

I work in the industry, and we bust a gut to make things happen on time. We like to be on time, and we have lives outside of work to return home to. My work WhatsApp group is often full of outraged colleagues cross about being late home for parents evening, birthdays, a football match, or just missing their means of transport home.

But flying is an untidy business affected by numerous external circumstances we often have no control over. Things I personally have had no control over recently include thunderstorms in Europe, birds at the airport, being struck by lightning, air traffic controls going on strike, lack of staff at destination due to them all bunking off for a public holiday, failure of navigational instrumentation at an airport. I’ve also had no control over mechanical issues on the aircraft which have needed attention - delays caused by everything from the in flight entertainment system not working to an entire generator not working.

There are however a lot of things that go wrong which are in the airlines control. I have inside knowledge of these but cannot really say more. Suffice to say that the customers’ desire to spend as little as possible on a flight combined with the airlines’ desire to make as much profit as possible often results in some very unfortunate cost cutting measures that keep no one happy.

One more thing to note is that what time other flights go at has no bearing on your delayed flight. Often an airline will allow one flight to go very astray with timings but keep everything else running to schedule. It is much easier to deal with 200 people 5 hours late than 20000 people 2 hours late. The knock on effects of that are huge and can take days to sort out (as you see when there is fog or snow.)

I’m all for claiming your compensation (I’ve claimed it myself to great advantage) but it’s worth noting that the pilots and cabin crew won’t be making up excuses or ‘airing the plane’ specifically to avoid compensation. It’s not their business. Safety and comfort are their primary concerns.

Thanks Back, interesting to hear inside view on this

To be fair I've no problem with the crew at all and ultimately know our safety is their priority and is never take my frustration out on them.

What pissed us off was it became clear at the end of the saga that our plane taking us home hasn't even left the tarmac in the uk (turns out due to other issues the crew had hit their flying hours limit) earlier that day yet we received initial communications from TUI to say we would have a delay when we'd almost reached the airport. I get it's tricky with how much info you give passengers and when but it feels like they are just feeding you a load of bollocks. A young man on our coach was tracking our plane so we all knew

And the a few days later we had an email with info we could quote if we wanted to pursue a delay claim with insurance yet handily omitting to tell us we could claim for a hell of a lot more with them! Ironically I only stumbled upon the EU regs compo info when I was Googling for how to get hold of TUI regarding our lost case (still not had this back) so if we'd had our luggage back ok chances are if not even have thought to claim for this.

I have never claimed for compensation for anything in my life but in this instance with the ££ these companies make I have no problem claiming what I'm owed when they fuck up

Hey Advice have you left yet? Hope you're all doing ok

In 1999 we were delayed in Crete for 18 hours! Back then we got £25!!

“I get it's tricky with how much info you give passengers”

You’d be amazed just how emotionally some people can behave when it comes to travelling by air! Sometimes they get so emotional (often fuelled by alcohol) that the police have to be called. The safety issues that can arise due to an overwrought pissed passenger on an aircraft at any stage of flight can be hugely detrimental to safety. So often discretion is required. However honesty is usually appreciated by the majority so that is the approach we aim for. Especially in these modern times when everyone is tracking and recording every last thing we do.

An airline is required to keep passengers informed of their rights to compensation, however they can discharge this obligation by including it in your booking small print. So it does pay to be aware of your rights. If claiming compensation and the airline denies responsibility, it is possible to request that the ombudsman look at the reason for delay. A thunderstorm is outside of the airline’s control. A staff shortage due to dodgy hiring practices during lockdown is within the airline’s control. (Although you might have to campaign hard to prove that particular example!)

@backinthebox

Well said.

@ThreeFeetTall

Blamed on bad weather in Europe but was also becuase once they had missed the original slot (due to arriving late) then it took 2.5hrs to get a new one. Not sure why they were late originally so might claim.

Quite possible the original lateness might have also been down to weather over Europe...

Ultimately crewing/schedules are run drum tight (because of economics, because of the desire for cheap flights). If a short haul crew ends up off schedule at the start of the day (e.g. due weather/ATC) there's little/zero room to make up the delay..

TBH it's a wonder of the modern world that commercial aviation works as well as it does for the vast majority of the time....

I think legislation such as EU261 was a good thing initially but I'm not sure now it is always working as was intended....