Flight compensation - Aliatalia Unhelpful!

stuartm

Hi

I hope someone can offer some advice on a recent poor experience with Aliatalia. We arrived in time to check in for our flight to be told that it had been cancelled due to 'technical problems' with the aircraft.

The airline could not offer us a flight within 5 hours of our original departure (the best they could come up with was later that evening, based on an original 7am scheduled departure).

We decided to cancel our flights and bought new tickets with a different airline. This cost us £20 per person more than the original flight and we also incurred rail fares to get us to our end destination (Florence) as we could only get flights to Rome with the new airline (Swissair).

Alitalia have confirmed in writing that the flight was cancelled and that this was due to technical problems with the aircraft. They have also refunded the original cost of the flights.

We are still out of pocket (around £220 in all). I attempted to claim compensation based on Martin's article, which suggests that we are due EURO 600 per passenger. Alitalia have claimed that 'technical problems' are 'exceptional circumstances' so they say no compensation is due.

I then spoke to the Airline Users Council who could only suggest that I use the Small Claims Court to get the compensation.

As Alitalia are based in Rome, does anyone know if this is worth pursuing? We were treated badly by the rude and unhelpful Alitalia staff at Heathrow, so ideally I'd like to get the full compensation. We also had to cut our holiday short by a day and arrived late on the outward journey.

I'd settle for claiming the amount we were actually out of pocket, however, if there is more chance of this.

I was really disappointed to find that the AUC have no real enforcement capability, although the lady I spoke to was sympathetic enough.

Any advice appreciated!

Thank you.

dmg24

http://www.caa.co.uk/default.aspx?catid=306&pagetype=90&pageid=4408

The airline is not obliged to pay compensation if it can prove that the cancellation was caused by "extraordinary circumstances which could not have been avoided even if all reasonable measures had been taken". Such extraordinary circumstances might occur "in cases of political instability, meteorological conditions incompatible with the operation of the flight concerned, security risks, unexpected flight safety shortcomings and strikes that affect the operation of an operating air carrier".

Technical problems would mean that there would be flight safety shortcomings, so unless you can prove that the airline were already aware of the issue (and therefore it was not unexpected), you would not be entitled to compensation.

Furthermore, assuming you were flying from London, it is just under 1500km to Florence, and therefore even if you was entitled to compensation, the relevant amount would be 250 Euros, not 600 Euros.

Voyager2002

Any chance of claiming on your travel insurance?

stuartm

Hi

We've tried claiming on travel insurance- no joy.

Also, the distance to Florence is more than 1500km (though it is close) if you take into account the original flight routing, which was via Rome.

Not sure if I can take this any further, but I think it might be worth Martin changing his guide. The current wording says that technical problems are not included in 'extraordinary circumstances' when they seem to be (or at least it's not possible to prove that they weren't).

Also, there is an implication that the AUC may be of some help if the airline refuses to pay compensation, when it's not likely (at least in cases such as this) that they can help at all and certainly don't have any powers over the airline, which Martin's article seems to imply.

Thanks for the replies, anyway.

richardw

"unexpected flight safety shortcomings" wow that is nice one for the airlines, they'll use that as a get out.

IvanOpinion

One wonders if being a trolley-dolly short for a flight would be included in that

ivan