What you are owed when a flight goes wrong

Is your flight covered?

Two routes in, and you only need one of them.

How much you are owed

It depends on how far you were flying, not on what you paid. A £29 fare and a £900 fare on the same route are worth exactly the same.

It is per passenger, not per booking. A family of four on a cancelled flight to Tenerife is owed four times £350, not one.

Children pay the same as adults. A baby on your lap with no seat of their own does not get a payment; a child with their own seat does.

The one discount the airline can apply

If they put you on another flight that got you there not much later, they can halve it: within 2 hours of your original arrival on short routes, 3 hours on medium, 4 hours on long. Later than that and they owe the full amount.

Delayed

3 hours or more late arriving and you are owed the amount above.

The clock that counts is the one at the other end. A flight that leaves five hours late but makes up time and lands two hours and fifty minutes late pays nothing. A flight that leaves on time and lands 3 hours late pays in full.

Cancelled

What matters is how much warning you were given.

Separately from any compensation, a cancellation always gives you a choice: a full refund of what you did not fly, or a seat on another flight to the same place, at their cost. They must offer both. Being handed a voucher is not a refund unless you agree to it.

Denied boarding and overbooking

Airlines sell more seats than the aircraft has. When everyone turns up, somebody is left behind — and if that is you, against your will, you are owed the full amount in the table, on the spot, plus a refund or a replacement flight.

You are not owed it if you volunteered in exchange for their offer, or if you were turned away for a reason that is yours: missing or invalid documents, being unfit to fly, behaviour, turning up after the deadline.

Moved, diverted or downgraded

They brought the flight forward

A flight moved earlier by more than 60 minutes is treated as a cancellation, not a schedule change — so the cancellation rules above apply. This one catches a lot of people out, because the airline calls it a “time change” in the email.

They landed you somewhere else

If you were diverted, your delay is measured to the airport you booked — including the coach they put you on — not to the one you landed at. The airline also pays for getting you there.

They put you in a worse cabin

Downgraded from the seat you paid for? You get a refund of part of that ticket: 30% on short flights, 50% on medium, 75% on long. An upgrade does not work in reverse — they cannot bill you.

Food and a hotel while you wait

This is the part most people never claim, and it is owed whatever the cause of the delay.

Once you are waiting 2 hours on a short flight, 3 hours on a medium one or 4 hours on a long one, the airline owes you food and drink in proportion to the wait, and two phone calls or emails. If you end up waiting overnight, they owe you a hotel and the transport to it, for as many nights as it takes.

At 5 hours, you can give up on the trip entirely and have the whole ticket refunded, including flights you have not taken yet.

When the airline does not have to pay

There is one defence: extraordinary circumstances — something outside their control that they could not have avoided even if they had done everything sensible. The burden of proving it is theirs, not yours.

“The incoming aircraft arrived late” is not an answer either. It just moves the question back a step: what delayed that flight? If the original cause was not extraordinary, yours is still payable.

Even with a genuinely extraordinary cause, they must show they did what they reasonably could — rerouted you, called in a spare aircraft, got you on a rival carrier. “There was a storm” is the start of the argument, not the end of it.

How long you have

Longer than the airline would like you to think. This is about old flights you had forgotten, and they are still worth money.

Elsewhere in the EU it is set by that country’s own law and can be as short as two years, so an old EU flight is worth checking sooner rather than later.

What to keep

Not much, and less than you would expect. The flight data — when it actually took off and landed, and why — we pull ourselves.

Doing it yourself

You can, and it costs nothing. Write to the airline’s customer relations address with your flight number, date, the names of everyone on the booking and the amount you are claiming, citing Regulation 261. If they refuse or ignore you, take it to their dispute scheme — most UK airlines belong to one — or to the national enforcement body for the country you departed from. If that fails, the small claims track exists and does not need a solicitor.

Plenty of people win that way, and if you have the patience for it you should. What stops most people is not the first letter — it is the refusal that arrives two months later quoting a technical fault, and the decision about whether to keep going.

That is the part we do. We check the flight data, write the claim, answer the refusal with the case law, and take it to the scheme or the enforcement body if it comes to that. It costs 30% including VAT of whatever we recover and nothing at all if we recover nothing. The fee in detail.