Airlines are ignoring their duty of care to passengers

Suppose you are flying via one of the European hubs, such as Amsterdam, Paris or Frankfurt, and the connection goes wrong – leaving you stranded overnight.

As long as you are travelling on a through-ticket (for example on KLM, Air France or Lufthansa), your rights are clear.

Whatever the cause of the delay – bad weather, air traffic control problems or an unauthorised drone – the airline must provide a hotel room, arrange an alternative flight as soon as possible and pay for meals until you are on your way.

At some distant airports, where an airline may have few staff, that obligation is sometimes easier to state than to meet. Yet at a hub airport, the home airline should surely have no problem meeting its obligation?

As 19-year-old Isobel Colleton found when she turned up at Amsterdam airport to find her flight to Manchester cancelled, that assumption is misplaced.

Ground staff for KLM handed her a letter that claimed: “Hotels do not allow us, an airline, to book rooms for our passengers.

“We are left with no other option but to inform you of ways to book accommodation yourself.”

Total tosh, as the Dutch airline later conceded. But only after Ms Colleton’s mother, at home in the UK, found herself phoning around hotels in the Amsterdam area at midnight to find a room for her teenage daughter.

After I wrote the story, other travellers got in touch with similar tales.

Fergus McKenzie’s inbound flight to Amsterdam was late and he missed the last connection to Edinburgh. Ground staff told him that he would have to find a hotel for himself and that he should spend no more than €120 (£104).

The rate for the nearest room he could find was twice this figure. “Hence, I decided to spend the night sitting in a cold, uncomfortable seat in the airport entrance, until the KLM lounge opened the next morning,” he told me.

After I asked the Dutch airline for an explanation, a spokesperson told me: “KLM sincerely apologises to Mr McKenzie for the lack of information provided to him in Amsterdam when his flight was delayed late at night.

“The amount of €120 is a guideline reflecting the hotel prices in the Schiphol area and is mentioned to manage our passengers’ expectations.

“KLM is aware of its duty to offer assistance to its disrupted passengers and will refund all reasonable costs incurred.”

Should you be booked to fly with the Dutch airline any time soon, you might want to print this article out and deploy it (respectfully) if ground staff are trotting out fanciful nonsense.

Mr McKenzie’s understandable decision to stay up all night at the airport, rather than risk not being refunded, saved KLM €240.

Yet if more passengers exercised their rights to accommodation, the airline might finally start managing disruption as the law requires.

There is a deeper question to be discussed about whether the passengers’ rights rules are disproportionately slanted in the traveller’s favour. I happen to think they are, and that helps to explain (though not excuse) the behaviour of some airlines. But while the regulations exist, they should be observed – and enforced.