CrowdStrike chaos cost me £1,000 – can I get it back?

Q As a result of the CrowdStrike IT chaos, I’ve incurred over £1,000 of additional costs after a trip from London Heathrow to Stuttgart on Eurowings went awry. My original flight was on the morning of 19 July, but I did not travel until the following day.

The additional costs are: a flight booked with Eurowings on the evening of 19 July that was then cancelled by Eurowings, overnight accommodation and taxis at the airport and another flight with Eurowings booked on the morning of 20 July. This eventually arrived at Stuttgart over three hours late. All Eurowings has said so far is that compensation isn’t payable, but surely I should get my money back. What do you advise?

Oliver W

A As tens of thousands of passengers became painfully aware, a botched software update by the US cybersecurity technology company, CrowdStrike, brought many airline and airport systems to a halt. The failure triggered the cancellation of dozens of flights to and from the UK.

European air passengers’ rights rules mean no passenger should be out of pocket as a result of a flight cancellation. But your case is somewhat complicated. Eurowings (a subsidiary of Lufthansa), should have offered an automatic free transfer to the later flight from Heathrow to Stuttgart; buying additional flights is something you should do only if the cancelling airline is unable or unwilling to help you.

From what you say, you paid out for a total of three flights: the original booking, the later-cancelled evening departure and the flight next morning, which operated late. You should be able to reclaim the cost of the latter two. Make a claim with the Alternative Dispute Resolution service offered by Schlichtungsstelle Reise & Verkehr, the Berlin-based company that investigates claims against the German airline and its subsidiaries.

Reasonable accommodation costs should also be reimbursed, along with itemised meal receipts. But the taxi fares may prove problematic; from what I know of Heathrow, they are likely to total £40 or more, when cheaper bus alternatives were available.

A claim for £220 in statutory delay compensation is unlikely to be met, since Eurowings has already claimed “exceptional circumstances”. There is an argument that airlines are liable on the grounds they chose to buy CrowdStrike software. But I think it will take a test case to decide, and I imagine you don’t want to become that individual – not least because you would probably need to fight the case through the German courts.

open image in gallery

Q A friend of mine has just retired from working for a big international airline. He’s now spilling some beans. I was interested to learn that airlines assume that a certain number of their connections will fail, and use that assumption as a reason to overbook flights. That strikes me as immoral, reckless and shortsighted because passengers who find themselves overbooked will surely choose a different airline next time.

Graham R

A I infer that your friend was working for one of the big network carriers whose business is based on the hub-and-spoke model: feeding passengers into one or more busy airports where everyone changes plane and takes off again. Connections are missed every day of the year. Just in the past week, the increasing conflict in the Middle East caused the closure of large swathes of airspace. As a consequence, flying times from western Europe to the Middle East hubs of Dubai and Doha have been extended, with many tight connections being missed.

In normal times a much smaller proportion of flights are affected, through issues such as localised bad weather or air-traffic control shortcomings. Missed connections comprise just one ingredient of passengers not turning up. Illness, changed circumstances, traffic jams on the way to the airport and not having compliant travel documents are among the other reasons why there are very often no-shows on a flight. Suppose the average is 5 per cent, ie 10 passengers on a 200-seat aircraft. Most airlines overbook flights (a couple that, notably, don’t are Jet2 and Ryanair). They usually get away with selling more tickets than there are seats available – a profitable practice when they guess right.

Any airline that is caught out with too many people showing up knows how to handle the problem correctly: offering increasing incentives until they have enough volunteers to offload. When this happens there is no moral problem with overbooking, everyone walks (or flies) away happy. But I know from passengers’ accounts that sometimes airlines just arbitrarily select people to turn away.

To go back to your original point, I have heard of a number of cases in which passengers on late-arriving flights have made it to the gate for the transfer only to be told that they have been offloaded already. Do ask your friend if he believes that reliance on missed connections is sometimes a highly questionable practice.

open image in gallery

Q I really appreciate the effort and information that you publish on passport validity. But it seems misinformation is viral and widespread. I believe this ridiculous situation is caused by airlines’ fear of the penalties and costs involved if they were to board a passenger with incorrect documentation. Isn’t it about time that the same penalties were imposed for turning away correctly documented passengers? It seems that a bit of “stick” might get them to pay more attention.

John M

A Thank you for your kind words. Ever since the Brexit transition agreement came to an end and the UK became a “third country”, I have done my best to ensure that travellers and airlines are fully aware of what that means for British travellers to the EU. To restate for the umpteenth time the two conditions a UK passport must meet: on the day of departure to the European Union and wider Schengen area, it must not have passed its 10th birthday (so look at the issue date). And on the intended day of departure from the EU, it must have at least three months to run (so look at the expiry date).

After easyJet and Ryanair finally agreed to this version of the rules, as opposed to their own, invented, policies, the frequency of properly documented travellers being turned away has dropped dramatically. Currently, there are many more cases in which the passenger, not the airline, is at fault. But as I have regrettably reported over the past couple of weeks, ground staff working for UK airlines are still getting the rules wrong. Time and again, they claim falsely that British passports are not valid for the EU beyond nine years and nine months.

As you say, potentially airlines can be fined for carrying passengers who are not legally admissible at their destination – though I have no examples at all of this happening since Brexit, and I know for certain that some people have slipped through the net and arrived in Spain, Greece etc with non-compliant passports.

I take your point about some kind of official fine for wrongly turning away passengers who are entitled to travel – but I contend that should already be happening. When “found out”, the airline must pay cash compensation of either £220 or £350 (depending on the distance of the flight) and meet other costs. They also suffer reputational damage. I shall keep going as long as required in taking up passengers’ cases when necessary.

Email your question to s@hols.tv or tweet @SimonCalder