When will easyJet confirm whether my flight has been removed?

Q You reported on Monday about easyJet announcing cuts to its flight plans this summer. On behalf of everyone who has a booking with easyJet, can you tell me: how soon do you expect them to announce the flights being removed? And what is your expectation of the kinds of destinations?

“Belf Manc”

A Britain’s biggest budget airline says it will cancel hundreds of flights this summer as it struggles with its planned schedule. After another weekend in which dozens of flights were grounded at short notice, easyJet announced: “In order to build additional resilience, easyJet is proactively consolidating a number of flights across affected airports. This provides customers with advance notice and the potential to rebook onto alternative flights.”

For how, and when, this happens, I am reaching back to September 2017, when Ryanair suddenly found itself embarrassingly short of pilots. Once the decision to cull thousands of flights was taken, fairly swiftly notifications went out to passengers. Its rival, easyJet, will now want to get through the key months of July and August – when average fares are higher than during the rest of the year – with as little further disruption as possible. So I will be surprised if all July passengers haven’t heard by the end of the week, and August’s travellers by the end of the month.

As to where: well, there was a strong clue in the line from easyJet saying: “We expect to be able to rebook the majority of customers on alternative flights, with many being on the same day as originally booked for.” That points to high-frequency links such as London to the key Costa Blanca, Costa del Sol and Algarve airports: Alicante, Malaga and Faro respectively. At weekends easyJet has six or seven flights a day, and removing one or two from the schedules is probably feasible. Longer, rarer services such as to individual Greek islands are much less likely to be culled: they tend to generate more revenue, and there are fewer options for rebooking passengers.

Domestic services will be high on the list of possible cancellations: they tend to earn a lot less than international links, and there are terrestrial options – notably the trains, which hopefully in July and August will not be strikebound. Likely targets will also include northern European cities such as Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Berlin, which tend to rely for profitability on high-spending, late-booking business connections. In July and August, these travellers are thin on the ground.

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Q I need to travel to Athens tomorrow and I can go from any London airport. No baggage. Which would be best?

Paul K

A While I applaud your last-minute approach to travel, be warned that a trip of 1,500 miles between two popular cities in the middle of summer, booked hours ahead, is never going to be cheap. I have focused entirely on one-way flights, since I imagine you will come back the same way,

I wonder if you have any Avios (the British Airways frequent-flyer currency)? That is by far the best option at this stage. The 8.30pm and 10.35pm departures from London Heathrow to Athens are available for Avios bookings in economy. My go-to option for short-notice flights to and from London is always BA with frequent-flyer points.

Pick the “9,250 points plus £17.50” option for the best deal; valuing each Avios at 1.25p, that brings in a fare of £132. (It will also include checked baggage, though I realise that’s not important.)

However, the chances are that either you don’t have Avios or you don’t fancy arriving in the Greek capital in the early hours (as both the available BA flight do), or both. In which case it’s an early start: the 5.40am from Gatwick on easyJet, which is currently £209. I think that is a fair price, considering at the last moment I have paid that much from Glasgow to Gatwick on easyJet.

It also gets you into Athens at 11.20, in good time for lunch.

You can shave £40 off this price if you take one of the connecting journeys proposed by Skyscanner, but the only options that save you cash are “self-connect” – in other words, if the first leg is delayed, you could be stuck in Corfu or Catania with no means of reaching the Greek capital.

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Q I believe you said that if your flight is cancelled and there is only business class available on an alternative flight, then the airline that cancelled your original trip has to pay for that seat. Have I got that right, and how easy is it to claim back from the airline?

Nick B

A With cancellations of flights at short notice still abundant, travellers need to be fully aware of their rights when suddenly confronted by the disappearance of their planned transport. The Civil Aviation Authority and Department for Transport this week reminded UK airlines about their obligations when they cancel a flight, saying: “If airlines cannot reroute passengers on their own services or partner airlines on the same day they should identify rerouting options on alternative airlines.” (“Rerouting” is the slightly unhelpful term used to mean “finding another suitable flight“; the route, ideally, remains exactly the same.) In practice, the chance of having the replacement trip booked for you almost never happens. So you need a fairly robust credit card.

There are limits: you would not be reimbursed for a private jet. But if only a seat in a higher class is available, that is what the cancelling airline must arrange for you. For example, the Saturday lunchtime easyJet flight from Amsterdam to Gatwick was cancelled at the airport at about three hours’ notice, and there was nothing left on easyJet that day and KLM had no availability. British Airways had one seat at £700. Given the huge sum involved – on top of the £220 cash compensation that the airline must pay – I would expect claiming this back to be quite seriously challenged.

You would need to have a screenshot showing this being the only available seat and the absence of any availability on KLM. You might even want to screenshot the non-availability of Amsterdam to London trains on Eurostar.

In fact, there was another way home – and to be fair on the cancelling airline it would be the right one to take. Travel on an ordinary train from Amsterdam airport to Brussels, and onwards from there on one of the regular Eurostar trains, price £200. In any case of disruption it is always best to minimise the cost. I understand that in the heat of the moment, with availability shrinking as soon as a cancellation is announced and 150 people all desperately try to find alternative routes home, it may be difficult to secure the proof and make an optimum decision. Just do your best.

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