Rob PegoraroReminder to my fellow travelers: Don’t forget your EU 261 rights
MWC Barcelona 2025 is finally in the books for me–not because I had one last piece published from my visit to the wireless industry’s global gathering in early March, but because I received the last payment I can reasonably expect from that trip to Spain.
This one didn’t come from a client but from an airline: Lufthansa paid me $262.71 to compensate for the last in a series of flight delays that caused a trip from London to Barcelona by air to take longer than trains would have required on that day.
(To recap that travel saga as briefly as possible: Swiss canceled a flight from London City Airport to Zurich and then canceled a replacement flight from Heathrow to Zurich, then my rebooked flight on Lufthansa from LHR to Frankfurt left so late that I missed my connection in FRA, which led LH to rebook me to connect again in Munich. I finally landed at Barcelona a little before 11 p.m., about eight hours later than originally planned. Anybody still wondering why I don’t check bags?)
As it does for many other situations, the European Union has a regulation for that scenario: EC no. 261/2004, “EC 261” or “EU 261” for short. The text of this rule runs almost 4,500 words, a typical level of EU verbosity, but it boils down to “airlines have to pay you money if they delay your arrival for enough hours for reasons that they could have controlled.”
I’m not a stranger to EU 261, having written a how-to about services that offer help with this regulation for The Points Guy travel site back in 2017. I knew that travel within the EU by an EU carrier would be covered (while U.S. airlines don’t have to pay EU 261 compensation for delays to Europe, only on flights from Europe). But cognitive-load limits are a thing, and so I kept on putting off the task of putting in for an EU 261 claim.
Getting dinged for a few nuisance fees a few weeks ago finally motivated me to fill out Lufthansa’s compensation form, selecting “Missed connecting flight” from its menu of mishaps. I filed with them, not Swiss, because the hours-late departure from LHR seemed the least explicable delay and had wiped out more of my MWC schedule on that Saturday than the other cancels and delays.
The German airline’s response was immensely more prompt than its operations had been for me months earlier. Less than 16 hours later, what I had to see as a first class level of responsiveness, I received a reply that got to the pleasant point: “There is good news: You will receive money back from us.”
That e-mail requested bank-account details for a U.S. dollar transfer; I provided them via Lufthansa’s feedback form, citing my case number as advised, Four and a half days later, I received a confirmation that the transfer was in progress, and two days after that the money was in my bank account.
I have read about many less pleasant EU 261 experiences–that Points Guy post focused on that possibility–but in this case, for whatever reason, the regulation and the airline each worked as they should have. It’s not every day, week or month that I can write something like that.
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