Stuck overnight in Athens airport

powerful_Rogue

Brie said:

@Sandtree
those were the rates used by my employers - very large UK companies - so I assumed they are fairly standard.  Another previous employer allowed £25 total per day - but that was in the late 1990s so I assume the rate might have gone up since then.

Home office is £5 for 5 hours away, £15 for 10 hours away and £26 for 24 hours away.

phatbear

powerful_Rogue said:

Brie said:

@Sandtree
those were the rates used by my employers - very large UK companies - so I assumed they are fairly standard.  Another previous employer allowed £25 total per day - but that was in the late 1990s so I assume the rate might have gone up since then.

Home office is £5 for 5 hours away, £15 for 10 hours away and £26 for 24 hours away.

Nope.

£5.00 for 5hrs
£10.00 for 10hrs
£26.00 15-24hrs, incidental allowance only applicable on 24hr stays

CKhalvashi

StevieD54 said:

Our group of 6 had an horrendous experience last weekend.  To cut a very long story short, the incoming Easyjet flight from Manchester was so late, our flight back had to be cancelled until the following afternoon.  We spent 24 hours in the airport sleeping on the the floor and various benches.  Easyjet offered no help whatsoever, no hotel accommodation, not even food vouchers.  I’ve complained to Easyjet via email and just had their reply, which effectively said forget it, no compensation due. They quoted the old ‘extraordinary circumstances’ get out clause.

Now on this MSE site I’ve seen this……
Airlines have to provide assistance such as food, phone calls and accommodation (where there's an overnight delay) to passengers whose flight has been cancelled, regardless of what caused the cancellation.

Does anyone on here have definite knowledge that this MSE statement is actually the law?  And if so, what can we actually claim for?  We slept on the airport floor (a few lucky passengers were found hotels for the night), so didn’t incur costs as such.  The important phrase here is ‘ regardless of what caused the cancellation’, which of course would negate easyJet’s attempt to refuse compensation by quoting ‘extraordinary circumstances’.

thanks in advance 

Most airlines in practice will ask someone to pay and re-claim from them unless there are other circumstances (such as a lack of funds) that would potentially mean this is impossible. At this point you need to present immediately to the handling company and explain this.

The actual wording of the legislation is here (for EJU/EZS flights and any flight departing the EU, for ex-UK EZY flights the wording is exactly the same but is under different legislation), which does not support the practice. Most airlines will not have an issue with reimbursing reasonable accommodation. Your flight will therefore come under this legislation.

Extraordinary circumstances will not get the airline out of the right to reasonable care, which will be proportionate to the delay. If you've bought food/drink in the airport you therefore will be entitled to this money back, but airlines will not be forced to pay for alcohol so may require a receipt.

As an aside, it can be moneysaving to sort your own accommodation. I've booked a hotel on an overnight delay from another airline in the past using my Wizz account through Booking.com, which got me about £3 (5%) back to spend on another flight, with 100% of the upfront expenses being paid by the other airline.

Exodi

sammynunes said:

How odd in these days of the internet and smart phones that someone would sleep in an airport rather than go through the simple process of organising a hotel.

I think this is easy to say this without any firsthand experience. To set the stage -

The last flight flight delay I encountered (flight was originally supposed to leave at 7pm but officially cancelled at 1.30am). We was informed that the delay was due to air traffic control due to bad weather over Europe.

At 1.30am the frantic queue to get hotel rooms starts, with Easyjet calling and booking people into hotels as quickly as possible. While the replacement flight was expected to be the next day, at the time they were not aware of exactly what time.

At around 2.30am an email goes out to say that Easyjet was unable to locate any other hotel rooms (luckily I was one of the fortunate few who had got one).

So then this poses the following dilemma.

a) if Easyjet, who'd you'd expect have the local resorts on speed dial, can't find a room, what chance do you have? Especially at 3am. Remember you'd also need to sort out transfers.
b) paying for things and trying to get the money back isn't appealing to most. Some may not have several hundreds of pounds laying about in the first place, while others may worry that Easyjet may renege paying them back.
c) as there was no clarity on when the replacement flight would be, you're put into a position where you (may) organise a hotel, which you might arrive at 3-4am, to then need to be out again very early.

For many people, it's just a lot simpler just to nap at the airport for a few hours.

CKhalvashi

Just to add to that, there's a certain type of extreme budget traveller who will be perfectly happy to spend the night in an airport.

I've done it several times waiting for a first wave departure (normally to Kutaisi, other airports are available) the next morning, having arrived on a late flight before (I had a 23:45 arrival in Krakow, 06:00 departure to Kutaisi the following morning in January, but have done this for Warsaw-Kutaisi and Bergamo-Yerevan previously also).

No point IMO spending £40-50 on a hotel when both one-way tickets have cost less than £20 to start with

That doesn't discount the fact though that the airline has a legal responsibility either to arrange a hotel on request, or to refund someone who is able to refund themselves. My overnights in airports are through choice, that of the OP was not. I get that the crew would have exceeded their permissible duty time, quite possibly through no fault of either themselves or the airline, but the law is clear on what OP's rights are in that situation.

I don't expect the airline to have all options on speed dial. They will have a number of hotels that they contract with available to them, which won't even make up a large part of the resort, let alone a large portion of all accommodation on offer within a reasonable distance. The ground handling company, however, should have access to the affiliate section of booking.com or similar to book it on Easyjet's behalf on this case, but it looks like they weren't prepared either.

sammynunes

The point is....you do it yourself....there is no need to muck around wasting time talking to airlines when you need to be booking a hotel room. They aren't going to do it quicker than a savvy traveller with a smart phone.

StevieD54

sammynunes said:

How odd in these days of the internet and smart phones that someone would sleep in an airport rather than go through the simple process of organising a hotel.

Sounds simple doesn’t it?  At 10pm we were promised hotel accommodation. We stood around for another three and a half hours whilst a handful of fellow passengers were allocated hotel rooms.  They departed in taxis.  At 1.30am we were then told “no more hotels available”, you’re on your own.  Both airport hotels were already full.  So 6 of us trying to find accommodation along with with 150 others at 2am in the morning in the first week of July. Simple process right?

If we’d been told at 10pm nothing doing, we probably could have sorted something.  Hindsight eh?