Will Emirates refund me after Gatwick drone chaos?

Q I was involved in the Gatwick drone issue. My Emirates flight to Dubai was due to take off at 9.40am on Thursday 20 December. This was delayed until 11pm on 21 December from Heathrow. However I had a wedding to attend on the Friday so my partner booked me a flight from Heathrow to Abu Dhabi for £1,219 on the evening of 20 December.

Coming back, I turned up at Dubai for my original flight home only to be told I was a “no-show” on the way out and so my flight home had been cancelled. My partner had to pay £569 to get me on my flight home. So this cost £1,788 in total. I contacted Emirates and the company said there is nothing it could do and would not provide a refund.

Ellie B

A What a miserable and expensive experience. Whether your partner can recover any cash depends partly on who said what and when, and partly on an interpretation of the legal position. First, the best outcome would have been an alternative Emirates flight. As you were travelling alone, you were in a reasonably good position – finding an extra seat for just one is often possible. I wonder if you made it clear that you had to travel on 20 December? Assuming there were no seats on the same day from Heathrow, I wonder whether staff looked to see if there were any seats available that evening from Stansted, Birmingham or Manchester? You would have had plenty of time to reach an alternative UK airport.

Next, having been booked on an unsuitable replacement flight the following night, did you explicitly say that you would not be travelling on it? If you did, then you should have been warned that the inbound leg of your journey would be cancelled automatically – as you discovered to your considerable cost when checking in at Dubai for the flight home. If staff failed to tell you this, and also did not point out that you had the right to cancel the whole trip for a full refund, then you could seek some recompense at least for the original cost of your Emirates booking (which I imagine was a lot less than £1,788).

Finally, you can argue that you were not provided with a full range of options when the first flight was cancelled. The Civil Aviation Authority now insists that alternative flights on rival airlines must be offered if the cancelling airline cannot get you to your destination on the same day. But many airlines are not yet adhering to this decision, and so you may need to consider legal action.

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