I've had a further think about this. I believe the floor level junior barrister for London level is £80 an hour. He would have got nearly a full day for the hearing, given the timings, plus a couple of hours for the day before the hearing. So that would be around the £800 mark including taxis and photocopying. The solicitors would have got perhaps £200 per hour for the pre-work, so that's at least £500. So my better estimate, adding in your winnings, would be a bill to Iberia in excess of £1500 for unsuccessfully defending a £182 claim!

Thank you ever so much for posting this lorcancoyle, it's really helpful and I'll add it to the top posts here. Some random thoughts from me. I'm also not a lawyer:

1) There is no way BA would have gone down this route. At worst there would have been an out of court settlement. The maths don't stack up. Moreover I think BA would normally settle this sort of issue inhouse anyway.

2) BA use topflight lawyers, including DLA Piper. I'm totally sure in this case they would have gone to BA and pointed out that no matter how arguable this was a waste of resources. DLA Piper may even have folded it and taken the hit themselves as part of a wider contract position. On the other hand, if it was a clearly hopeless case, BA will pursue the matter in court, no two ways about that.

3) Though I've not taken on BA, who in the main are one of the good guys in this area, I have dragged other airlines to court, namely Ryanair, easyJet and KLM. What I find utterly baffling is that despite the high regard the legal profession has (my mother still wants me to be a lawyer), they are incredibly inept on the ground - papers missing, instructions not received, deadlines ignored. I'm surprise that district judges are so tolerant when one side is fully up to spec, and the expensive barrister is struggling to remember the casework. So I'd like to think that those who claim in person get some credit for being organised, but in reality the judges ignore this factor. Basically so long as you show your face in court on time everything is forgiven. As in this case I guess the judge can simply point to some material incompetence in the defence to get to the same place.

4) In this case, the judge has adopted a reasonable outcome in the final analysis, but I would struggle to see how baggage delays are extraordinary and (e.g.) birdstrike, or a fuel gauge keeling over, is not.

5) The timetabling of court cases is woeful, you basically have to throw a day away. I've no doubt this is a Spanish custom to keep the legal profession bankrolled. Add into this all the work you had to do, then unfortunately you can see why many people don't bother.

6) The CAA is supposed to defend passengers' interests. Once again we see how they swing far too close to the interests of airlines. They would hotly deny this, but I hope you send some feedback to the CAA bigwigs to let them know how their documentation is not helping passengers.

7) This shows how it should work: the consumer has presented their case and the judge agreed. However you can see how the system is stacked against the consumer if he/she hadn't dug into the finer points of Lords Diplock's pronouncements. On the other hand the number of significant cases for EC261 isn't that great, about a dozen or so, hence it shouldn't be that problematic. However I find it interesting how little district judges go into the forensic side of that, but are very happy to go forensic over the good Lords Diplock and Denning. I guess it was an interesting education for you, but still....

Let us know if they pay up, some big companies go into shock over small court cases and can't bring themselves to write the cheque. I would quite like to join you raiding the kitchens of Iberia's offices, so we can eBay all their coffee mugs!