What’s the longest you’ve been delayed at the airport?

I had a couple of flights cancelled during the bad winter of a few years ago because of very heavy snow in Edinburgh and Heathrow. BA offered a flight the next day or a refund without my having to ask. I took the option of a flight the next day, and then the next day I opted for the refund rather than yet another flight the next day, both of which were spontaneously offered again by BA. No complaints there.

Another time I had a flight delayed until the next day because of heavy fog in Luton. This time it was easyJet who spontaneously offered to put me up in a hotel and fly me home the next day. Apart from the fact that I had to fight to get refunded the full price of my night’s stay in a hotel (easyJet initially were only going to refund me £80 instead of the full £88 – like they don’t make enough money!), I am satisfied with the way I was treated by easyJet.

I have a few other examples of being treated correctly by airlines after delays and missed flights, so luckily no unhappy experiences for me yet.

If you choose to fly to a politically unstable country against recommendation, maybe you don’t “deserve” to be compensated, and maybe airlines can’t always recognise potentially unruly passengers as they are boarding the plane, but what about travel insurance kicking in at least in the latter case? Another subject, but I wouldn’t be surprised if insurance companies too had a caveat somewhere meaning you’re stuffed.

Hi, everyone,
I had a couple of problems with delays and cancellations and each time the airlines has treated me fair enough, paying me a hotel night’s stay. They never gave me “technical issues” as a reason for the delay, but I know some cases. A friend of mine, for instance, had an issue with a flight London-Paris last year, and the airline didn’t want to refund her the money. She made a claim through a flight claim service and she won £300.
I think this court ruling will help a lot of people to claim their rights as passengers. In the meantime, this kind of companies might serve to claim a money compensation which correspond to you legally.

[Link removed. Thanks, mods.]

Thomas Cook still claiming EC for a technical problem AFTER Huzar case & I’m not confident in taking airline to small claims court, it’s a little daunting so they win.
How can they be allowed to do this?

Our flight home from Miami to Heathrow in April this year had to turn around and return to Miami one hour into the flight due to a technical issue. We were delayed 25 hours before coming home the following evening. BA have rejected our claim due to a “technical issue”, so based on the Huzar ruling we have now referred it back to them. Fingers crossed..

We were delayed 14 hours on a recent Ryanair flight from Palermo (5 June, flight Fr3919) and the following day Ryanair emailed us to say there would be no compensation as this was due to extraordinary circumstances. I have written to Ryanair. No reply. In fact we had to stay at a hotel at Stansted on our arrival at 3am and incurred £156 of actual extra expenditure. Our travel insurance tell us this only covers us until we are “home” though we do not live at or anywhere near Stansted!

What is the use in Which? publishing pro forma letters and details of our consumer rights when Ryanair flagrantly avoids responsibility?

What more redress is there?

When returning on a round trip to Los Angeles earlier this year with United I had my first leg cancelled due to a technical problem with the plane. I feared the worst but was rerouted by United staff onto Lufthansa flights with Lufthansa even providing enhanced seating to compensate for the fact my arrival would be slightly delayed (just a few hours).

No fuss, no quibble, no arguments, just genuine attempts to fix the problem quickly. Fair play.

Most of the comments here are critical of the industry (understandably I might add), but it’s not all doom and gloom!

It was about 10 years ago aprox but we used Virgin to go to Antigua for a wedding, i kept smelling something rather nasty long story short previous passenger had been ill the seat was not cleaned properly and i had been sitting in sick I stank was embarrassed and they were rude and arrogant didnt even offer to move us (yes there were other seats) we did contact at the time but they were not interested

My flight from Cape Town to Heathrow, BA58 on the 23rd November 2014 was delayed a full 24 hours, reason being “a blockage” of the runway caused the flight to be diverted. Once diverted the Captain terminated the flight because the “crew were out of hours”, has anyone claimed on this flight and succeeded