He was told that the next possible one was in two days and that he had been booked into a hotel. When the Guardian rang the airport to ask about the fire it emerged that airlines chose which flights to cancel with at least five days’ notice.Ĭhris Laker of Crawley arrived at Amsterdam airport to find his flight cancelled without warning. Along with hundreds of other passengers, easyJet told her that she did not qualify for compensation because it was due to “extraordinary circumstances” – the get-out clause that allows airlines not to pay up. Katie Chang was due to fly from Rome to Gatwick in July with a friend on an 11am flight, but at 6pm the night before she was sent a text informing her it had been cancelled. Her friend gave up trying and has never received a penny. She accepted that problems occur, but what she hadn’t counted on was her subsequent 14-month battle to get the €400 compensation which she was due.
She and a friend endured a 27-hour delay that involved a long bus ride to Málaga, then a second botched attempt to get on a plane in the middle of the night. Mags Hobson missed a funeral after a minor technical problem grounded her flight from Gibraltar back to London in July 2014. “I thought I was buying a flight, not a lottery ticket,” says Walton.Ĭomplaints to easyJet often fail to get off the ground. The pair were offered a direct flight departing three days later, or a flight to Paris that morning with a connecting flight to Málaga the following evening.įorced to abandon their trip, easyJet paid statutory compensation, but they lost the cost of the hotel, hire car and transfer. They had checked in online a week earlier, and had their boarding passes and seats allocated, but when they tried to check in their luggage at Luton – over two hours before take-off – they were told the flight had been overbooked. Gary Walton’s five-day golfing break in Spain was wrecked when he and a friend were “bumped off” their flight. This is a flavour of what readers have been saying: But at issue is the way it responds when things go wrong. It is the biggest airline in the UK, flying more people to and from Europe than even Ryanair, and most journeys go smoothly. This reduced the number of flights allowed in and out but, despite knowing days in advance, easyJet chose – two months into the disruption – to cancel flights a matter hours before they were due to leave. Many of the problems appear to stem from the way it chose to react to a serious fire in May at Rome’s Fiumicino airport.
Two weeks ago it announced a pre-tax profit of £686m – up 18% on the previous year, leaving passengers further incensed, and bemused that an airline that carried 68 million customers could have such an approach.
Since two major test cases went against the airlines earlier this year most carriers have been paying up without dispute – but not easyJet.
Specialist lawyers describe how the company repeatedly puts in place legal obstacles to claims it says are perfectly legitimate. Two months ago AirHelp, which provides online legal help for those claiming compensation for delays, said its data showed easyJet had the worst record of any airline for paying out what is legally due.
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