Originally Posted by
Omba
Bit of advice needed if possible.
My son and friend had their 16.00 (ish) flight home from Nice cancelled Sunday, they have been re-booked onto the last flight Monday (21.00 ish)
They have been put up in a hotel but I have a few questions, (having read the EU261 widget)
- In terms of sustenance throughout Monday, I assume they can keep their receipts, they shouldn't be expected to hang around the airport all day should they?
- Did they, or do they still, have the option to say, "that 30 hour delay is unreasonable, we want either booking onto another airline or the scope to go home by train at BA's expense"
- In terms of EU261, my understanding of exceptional circumstances is that weather delays are not valid for claims. However in the main thread I saw this...
15) What about knock-on effects?
This relates to disruption caused by aircraft being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, leading to you being disrupted. For example if you are due to fly from Cape Town to London but your aircraft is still stuck in New York due to a blizzard. In that situation you should be entitled to compensation.
- Clearly the snow delay was not in Nice itself, so would they therefore come under the scope of the compensation scheme?
Thanks all in advance
Yes, keep all refreshment receipts and submit them. They only need to show at the airport in time to check in for their revised flight.
EC261 doesn’t put a timescale on being re-routed on other carriers, or by other means, and in the circumstances just over a day’s delay to remain on BA might not be considered too unreasonable by a court - if it stretched to several days they might have a case. The closer they get to the revised flight, the harder it becomes to argue. I personally wouldn’t consider pursuing this.
The knock-on effects don’t really apply here, I’d say. Nice is a destination where most airlines will back to back aircraft, so if the plane can’t leave LHR then clearly the return is not going to operate either. In the circumstances it wouldn’t be reasonable or practical for BA to route an aircraft from elsewhere to fly to Nice then back to London because the fleet would be needed to ferry passengers from wherever that ‘elsewhere’ was, at which point it would be stuck in London. The knock-on might apply when the plane is due to go on to a different destination after arriving in London, as BA would then have time and available planes at its hub to arrange an alternative, so it might be reasonable (and this is a key word in EC261) to expect them to do that rather than wait for the flight to arrive from wherever it’s stuck.