Originally Posted by
Doc Savage
Aren't there EU regulations requiring major compensation for involuntary downgrades? I'd be firmly reminding the staff of this and perhaps more.
Don't waste your time in the lounge, demand to see supervisors and escalate this up the chain till you get your reserved seat back.
This is nonsense as long as you checked in at the airport in plenty of time, as it appears you did.
That said, £500 is a reasonable amount of money.
Yes, but these were award tickets and I suspect that EU261 compensation is a percentage of the fare paid for the downgraded sector.
Some airlines in these situations try to select passengers to minimize the downgrade compensation to be paid, perhaps selecting those on award tickets or in other situations where the percentage of fare will be a small number (perhaps a broken fare with different segments in different cabins costs more than the through fare in a higher cabin class) or sometimes sending the "lucky" person back to coach (a double or even triple downgrade, which seems to just count as a downgrade under EU261) rather than downgrading one from FC to biz and someone else from biz to coach, thereby incurring two downgrade penalties according to the regulations.