Who do I complain to about a flight back from Kenya?
Q My wife and I booked flights from Manchester to Nairobi through a company called Omega Flightstore. The flights were with Kenya Airways. The journey out went without a hitch, flying from Manchester to Amsterdam on KLM with a Kenya Airways flight number, then the onward flight to Nairobi.
The return journey was a totally different story. The flight was to be a two-step flight, flying on Precision Air from Nairobi to Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania, a connection to KLM to Amsterdam and another to Manchester. But the first flight was late. At Dar they said that the gate was closed and they wouldn’t let us board the plane. So we were stuck. We had to get Tanzanian visas at the airport and be put up in a hotel for the night. We were left there for all of the next day, having to keep contacting the airline to try and find out
what was going on.
Eventually, after I contacted Kenya Airways’ head office, we were booked on a flight back to Nairobi and put on an overnight KLM flight to Amsterdam. We arrived home 24 hours late. I had to pay again for prebooked onward travel home to Anglesey, and we both lost a day’s work. Who can I complain to and what compensation can we expect?
David S
A Your are welcome to complain to Precision Air for triggering this unfortunate chain of events, but I don’t think you can expect much in the way of compensation from any of the parties involved. The online travel agent Omega Flightstore has ceased trading since you booked. Your itinerary was ticketed through Kenya Airways, rather than its partner KLM. As the Kenyan carrier is a non-EU airline, it is not covered by European air passengers’ rights rules on flights originating outside the EU. (With a KLM ticket, you may have been able to argue that the Dutch airline was responsible through its code-share arrangement.)
As it is, you have provable financial losses which in theory you can claim under the terms of the Montreal Convention, which governs international air travel worldwide. By all means try claiming from Precision Air, based in Tanzania, by emailing the evidence to contactcentre@precisionairtz.com. But if your claim is declined (or ignored), I am not sure how you would proceed. At that point I would aim to put a stressful and expensive experience like this behind me – though you might find that your travel insurance is able to provide some recompense.
For future bookings to Africa, you might aim for simplicity – I try to limit the number of hops, to reduce the amount of potential problems.