Travel Tips: How to Determine if you are Eligible for Compensation

Have you been stranded on an airport for hours, your flight was delayed or even canceled?

It seems it has happened to everyone at some point of time. You survived, and you ask for you due compensation from the airline, and what you need to do now is to check if you are eligible for flight delay compensation.

The best thing to do is to contact a compensation claim company, and they can tell you right away whether you are eligible for compensation or not. We suggest you use services like  www.claimflights.com and www.claimflights.co.uk .

If you want to check yourself if you are eligible for flight delay compensation, here are a few useful pointers:

First thing you must have In order to qualify for compensation is a reservation and you must have arrived on time for your flight, as outlined by the airline’s check-in policy.

For the flight delay to fall under the EU regulation it must be either departing from any airport in the EU, or arriving in the EU with an EU carrier, or a carrier from Iceland, Norway or Switzerland.

Now, if all those criteria have been met, the flight disruption, you have experienced, must fall into one of the following three categories:

Denied Boarding

We all know that airlines can oversell their flights sometimes. In this case you may find either yourself in a very unpleasant situation if you have been denied boarding. Standard protocol requires airlines to first call for volunteers who might give up their seat for another passenger.  Whether you were denied boarding or volunteered to give up your seat, you are entitled to compensation by the EU regulation.

Delays

Sometimes you board your flight, later than take-off time. If this happened to you and your flight has been delayed, first you then need to look into the length of your delay and the total distance to your flights destination. This will decide the type of the compensation you are eligible for. Remember that it is always the length of the delay and the distance that determine if something is considered a delay eligible for compensation

Delays of over two hours for flights less than 1500km

Delays of over three hours for flights that are between 1500 and 3500km

Delays of over four hours for flights that are over 3500km

Delays over five hours for any distance

Cancelled Flight

If your flight is cancelled entirely, you are eligible for compensation. The procedure is pretty similar to the one for flight delay, and basically the same rules apply.

Also there are exceptions, like weather delays, when airlines are not required to pay out compensations. To avoid this, make sure you check a few facts first.

First you should check if something happened beyond the control of the airline, like a strike or a volcanic eruption.

Secondly, you should check all the weather at the time of the airplanes departure from the airport, and on its arrival to the airport. It would be useful to check if there were severe weather.

These are the few brief facts to now when trying to determine if you are eligible for compensation.