Recent Experience (interesting new points too)

takingthemon86

We had a delay of 8 hours flying from LHR to North America. The airline (which I cannot disclose for legal reasons) operates out of North America, and has "service offices" in the UK.

When the airline informed us of the delay, we went to their desk at LHR (in the air-side departure lounge) and requested that we be moved to a different flight (BA had one departing 2 hours after our flight with availability). We were informed they couldn't take our bags off as it would take too long.

E-mails and a letter before claim were ignored and after 4 weeks I filed a claim with the small claims court. Within 4 days of making the claims court filings (using the airlines UK service offices as the defendant) their global legal counsel contacted me to "sort things out".

Not only did my claim include the EU prescribed amounts, but I claimed an additional amount (around £2k) for other losses (loss of holiday, loss of one nights accommodation, cost of a private taxi to take us to the ski resort having missed the coach ect).

Usually the airline won't cover these consequential losses, so you are limited to the prescribed amounts under EU law. However, my argument was - because they denied us our statutory right to have our bags removed at the airport, this opened up an avenue for us to claim for consequential loss (i.e. losses arising from them denying us our statutory rights and anything we could have avoided by being allowed to cancel and move onto the BA flight).

They said they would never pay out for these losses unsurprisingly but would honour the prescribed delay compensation under EU law. I politely told them to do one, and they instructed UK solicitors to deal with the claim. Very shortly thereafter they confirmed they would settle the full amount I had claimed for plus the court fee if I withdrew and signed a release and confidentiality agreement (hence why I can't give too many details). I received around £2.5k.

After this experience we filed a claim against a EU based airline for a historic delay (4 years ago), the airline was a popular tour operator and they claimed they had no record of our flight (we only had the time and date of the flight nothing else). After filing with the small claims court they promptly settled.