The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Ditching EU rules on flight delays will hurt
New proposals on compensation from airlines could cost passengers dear, says Nick Trend
One big consumer benefit of EU membership is the high level of protection and compensation it gives travellers against delays and cancellations when flying. So generous are the provisions, in fact, that you can – in some cases – be entitled to hundreds of pounds even though your flight might have cost you far less.
Those rules aren’t there just to enrich individuals. The EU’s rationale is that tough penalties deter airlines from cancelling flights for commercial reasons and encourage them to operate more efficiently and avoid delays.
The EU provisions are still part of UK law, so as things stand, if your flight is cancelled, you are entitled to a full refund or another flight to your final destination. If cancellation meant you would arrive more than three hours late on a UK domestic flight, you would, depending on the cause, be entitled to up to £220 in compensation. The amount is higher for longer flights and also applies to delayed flights – again, depending on cause.
But Brexit has emboldened airlines to lobby the Government and urge it – as the Department for Transport puts it – to “rebalance the rates for compensation, to be more representative of the cost of travel” on UK domestic routes. The suggestion being considered is to replace the EU rules with a compensation scheme similar to that for rail delays. You’d get a full refund after a 90-minute delay or cancellation, or a proportion of your fare for shorter delays.
If you have had a problem with your holiday or travel arrangements, contact our troubleshooter, Gill Charlton, or our consumer expert,
Nick Trend, at the email address below.
We also have more than 150 destination experts all over the world who can help with suggestions for great places to stay, to eat and to visit. Please email asktheexperts @telegraph.co.uk, giving your full name and, if your query is about a dispute with a travel company, your address, telephone number and any booking reference. We regret that we cannot personally answer all queries, but your email will be acknowledged
On the surface, this sounds reasonable. But this week the Consumers’ Association published research suggesting that such a change would cut payouts dramatically. The editor of Which? Travel, Rory Boland, estimates that they would drop from £220 to an average of just £57 per passenger. Even under an alternative scenario also being considered, passengers would lose out. This would involve rules changing so that passengers get a refund of their ticket, plus the same amount in compensation. In this case, Which? says, passengers would get £106 less than they do now.
This means that for each cancelled or heavily delayed flight covered by EU regulations, airlines would save tens of thousands of pounds. Which? cites an Edinburgh to London service with an average one-way economy ticket price of £44. If it were full, an airline would potentially have to pay out up to £39,600 for a cancellation or a delay of three hours or more. Under the Government’s proposed scheme, the maximum penalty is reduced to just £7,920.
This, Boland argues, would make airlines much more likely to make cynical decisions, such as “consolidating” two half-empty planes to reduce costs, or simply cancelling flights that were undersold. There will also be a temptation to overbook flights in the knowledge that compensating passengers who have to be bumped off will be much cheaper than it is now.
A change in the rules would also create an imbalance in rights for travellers from UK regional airports travelling via another hub. If you flew from Manchester to Sydney via Heathrow on a British airline, you would have far less protection from delay and cancellation on the first leg than you would if you flew via Amsterdam with KLM, say.
Boland points out that the comparison with rail travel doesn’t stand up. Trains depart much more frequently than flights and have a greater capacity to absorb additional passengers, so delays and cancellations don’t have the same impact as they do with flights.
All this reveals that the post-Brexit battle lines between consumer rights and big business are being drawn. Airlines are effective lobbyists and may be on the way to a victory over passengers. What concerns me is that other important consumer rights enshrined in EUinspired legislation – notably financial protection when booking package holidays – may also come under attack.