Originally Posted by
UKtravelbear
You simply don't have a claim.
You were re-routed and actually arrived earlier than your original schedule.
That you departed earier that the original schdule does not matter - it only does if your original flight was cancelled - which it wasn't.
That's correct. If it was cancelled AND rebooked then leaving more than an hour early does you a claim on Article 7 (compensation), potentially at the 50% rate. But if delayed or potentially delayed then the only thing that matters is whether your arrival at the end point, on the ticket, was more than 3 hours late or not.
The reason for this discrepancy is that the cancellation + rebook is in the original Regulation, and worded fully for the relevant circumstances. There isn't any compensation for delays in the Regulation, none whatsoever. However the CJEU made a ruling that moved the reading of the Regulation to include delays, and the court came up with a flat 3 hour time limit. The Regulation typically has all sorts of bandings in it, but on this point the judges made it a simple 3 hour delay = Article 7 compensation. They didn't rewrite the Regulation as such, it's not their job to do that, so several aspects don't neatly dovetail in with EC261 as a whole.
The one hour limit only occurs in Article 5, the cancellation part of the Regulation so as things stand it only relates to cancellations. Now if a case was made to CJEU saying a greater than 1 hour early departure caused by delays is just as inconvenient as one cause by cancellations, I'm more than 95% sure it would find favour by the Court, but to the best of my knowledge this hasn't happened.
Anyway that is a long way of saying you don't have a case and in a way what BA did was exactly what the Regulation was intended to do: prevent delays to the passenger by proactively coming up with a new schedule. BA, incidentally, are doing this more and more with third country itineraries, I'm told they've added some logic into the rebooking software and they've finally twigged the business case behind this.
But anyway, that's a long way over from me thanking you,
lgflyer, for raising the issue, since we will see more cases like this in the future.