EasyJet rejected claim - 'severe weather'

eskbanker

woollyhaggis said:

eskbanker said:

woollyhaggis said:

and not forced a 2 hour wait for buses to Bristol from Gatwick after we landed there

'Forced' seems an odd term in the circumstances - sourcing multiple buses/drivers and coordinating the logistics of getting passengers and their baggage onto them is far from an instantaneous process!  However, even if the delay could have been, say, four hours instead of six, that wouldn't actually make any difference to their liability to pay compensation, or do you think they realistically could have got you to Bristol within three hours of your scheduled arrival time there?

It's not like we suddenly dropped out of the sky at 12pm - we were told sometime before 9.40am that there was a 90% chance of diverting to Gatwick, so Easyjet had at least 2.5 hours warning. There was no possibility of getting us to Bristol within 3 hours because we left Edinburgh 2 hours late. My background reading on this indicated that the airline should prove that they took all possible measures to re-route affected passengers at the earliest opportunity, including alternative transport measures. I think it's unlikely that a 2 hour wait for a bus and a 3 hour bus journey (per Google maps) was the best they could do, but I'm probably more fixated on this than I should be because that wait meant I couldn't use the bus and had to pay for a train instead, due to onward travel arrangements.

But the point was that if they'd got you to Bristol with a delay of, say, four hours rather than six, that wouldn't actually have made any difference to their financial liability (if any) to you, i.e. once the delay exceeds three hours then there's no incentive for them to bust a gut to speed things up, in terms of how the legislation is structured.

woollyhaggis said:

eskbanker said:

woollyhaggis said:

I'm not convinced that fog and gusty wind constitutes extraordinary conditions in Bristol in February but I realise it's probably a weaker argument.

The example cited in the regulations is "meteorological conditions incompatible with the operation of the flight concerned", rather than these being unexpected as such.

Depends on whether that is flight or aircraft? I think the flight was operable in the weather conditions, just not with that aircraft. Additionally background reading suggested that weather that is inherent in the normal exercise of the carrier’s activity does not constitute extraordinary circumstances.

Are your sources authoritative or just opinions of ambulance-chasing lawyers trying to drum up business?  That word 'inherent' is indeed important, but it would be hard to argue that weather bad enough to force a diversion isn't extraordinary circumstances.