Am I due compensation for my cancelled Spain flight?

Q I am booked to fly with easyJet from London Gatwick to Almeria in Spain, but my return flight on 21 June has just been cancelled by easyJet. The alternative flight offered on 23 June doesn’t work for me. I can get a full refund – but am I also entitled to compensation?

Richard C

A As easyJet knows, its decision to cancel your flight from Almeria to Gatwick triggers two specific obligations. It appears that the airline, which is currently grounding dozens of flights every day, has not fully informed you about your legal rights.

The first requirement is to offer you an alternative flight (described as “re-routing”) on the original day of travel, including buying a flight on an alternative airline for you. There is an early evening flight on Vueling from Almeria to London Gatwick on 21 June with plenty of space available.

The guidelines provided by the Civil Aviation Authority say: “Re-routing should be offered at no additional cost to the passenger, even where passengers are re-routed with another air carrier or on a different transport mode or in a higher class or at a higher fare than the one paid for the original service.” In other words, the cost is easyJet’s problem, not yours. But since the flight is being sold for around £60, in your position I would take the easyJet refund and buy a new ticket myself.

The second obligation: to pay you compensation of £350; the flight length is 98km above the 1,500km threshold for this higher payment. Finally, if you were planning to rely on trains to get home from Gatwick airport on 21 June, note that a national rail strike is set to take place that day. So you might want to book for an alternative day anyway.

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Q With things as they are, is it worth booking an airport lounge?

April

A A perceptive question. I infer that when you say “things as they are”, you mean the current high level of flight cancellations, together with long queues and, often, significant flight delays.

Just now I can see that flights on Norwegian and Wizz Air from Gatwick are running over two hours late, while Jet2 passengers from Stansted to Faro face a four-hour hold-up. When flights are late, a paid-for lounge can be an excellent investment: they tend to be less wearying than the general melee inside the waiting area of a crowded airport.

Yet I certainly don’t advise booking ahead of time. Given the rate of flight cancellations, particularly on easyJet in and out of Gatwick, there is some chance you will not be able to use the lounge. For example, tomorrow, early flights on easyJet from Gatwick to Amsterdam and Berlin are both grounded. If you are obliged to fly from Luton instead, that airport will be uninterested in the lounge booking you have for Gatwick.

Even if you wisely take the optimistic view that your flight will go ahead, another issue comes into play: the length of the queues for check-in and to pass through security. If you get through with, say, 45 minutes before your flight, then a visit to the lounge will be the opposite of relaxing – you will be looking nervously at the screens and wondering how long it will take you to walk to where you need to be. Most airlines say you need to be at the gate 20 or 30 minutes before departure.

So practice “masterful inactivity” – ie, wait and see. Research the locations of the lounges that allow paid-for visits (rather than those that are reserved for members of airline loyalty schemes). Just turn up, unless there is an advantage to booking online using the airport wifi.

Finally, if your flight is unfortunately delayed, note that many lounges impose a three-hour maximum stay (with extra hours payable) and that some shut relatively early in the day – the easyJet Gateway Lounge at Gatwick’s North Terminal closes at 4pm.

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Q I’ve had a flight delay compensation claim rejected. The plane took off 30 minutes late and had to divert due to crack in a window. We had to change planes and eventually arrived over five hours late. What’s your views on this – should I push further?

Sam W

A You can try, but expect some pushback. Compensation is governed by European air passengers’ rights rules, which have been imported wholesale in to UK law following Brexit. The general presumption is that if your flight arrives three hours or more behind schedule, you are entitled to compensation – starting at £220 for the shortest flights up to 1,500km (Luton-Budapest is about the limit), increasing to £350 for those between 1,500km and 3,500km and £520 for longer flights (Gatwick-Cairo is 3,502km).

The only grounds on which an airline can reject a claim is if “extraordinary circumstances” were responsible for the problem, ie it was beyond the carrier’s control. Some of these are obvious, such as bad weather, security alerts and air-traffic control restrictions. But most technical problems, such as the kind you experienced, are regarded as “inherent in the normal exercise of the air carrier’s activity” and do not excuse a payout.

Having said that, there appears to be no downside for airlines in rejecting claims (except, perhaps, reputationally) initially, and so they will often turn applications down routinely.

The airline will, I expect, plead that a cracked window constitutes an “unexpected flight safety shortcoming” as a reason for rejecting your claim – it is cited in the rules as an example of “extraordinary circumstances”. In which case you can counter with the view of the European Union (on which UK law relies) that a breakdown “which was caused by the premature malfunction of certain components of an aircraft … remains intrinsically linked to the very complex operating system of the aircraft [and] “is inherent in the normal exercise of the air carrier’s activity”.

If you cite those key elements of law, and explain that you will go to Money Claim Online if your application for compensation is rejected, you may get a positive response. If not, you will need to invest £35-£70 in a court fee to try to secure what appears to be due to you.

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