Lufthansa London-Frankfurt-Buenos Aires

LawsonSteele

Hi all - my wife and I turned up at LHR on 27th November 2023 only to discover the two flights from LHR-FRA-EZE were cancelled (we were rebooked onto flights 24hrs later). I tried to reclaim my statutory allowance + my £200 taxi expenses. Lufthansa replied: we'll pay your expenses €200 (i.e.,  not GBP!) but not compensation because the flights were cancelled due to weather. that's absolute rubbish: there airlines were flying that day, including an earlier flight from Lufthansa! How do I 'get them'?

eskbanker

While it's true that extraordinary circumstances (including "meteorological conditions incompatible with the operation of the flight concerned") negate airlines' liability to pay out compensation, they should provide a more meaningful justification than "due to weather", so probably worth pushing back and seeking more detail, bearing in mind that the adverse weather wasn't necessarily at Heathrow.

Ultimately if you're unable to convince them to pay out and still feel that you have a case then you can take it to the German ADR body listed in their Ts & Cs....

unforeseen

There were thunderstorms, heavy rain and strong winds forecast for Buenos Aires at the time of your flight. That may well be the reason for the cancellations. 

daveyjp

Frankfurt airport had significant snowfall at the end of November.  Flights were delayed and cancelled due to demands on de icing equipment.

LawsonSteele

thanks all - how can I see historic weather at different locations?
I would also point out that Luf had their systems down when I turned up at the airport - in fact they had a system outage most of the day (not sure when it ended) which I suspect was the real reason (or low level of passenger bookings on the flights)

LawsonSteele

also, does anyone know which ombudsman to complain to please?

eskbanker

LawsonSteele said:

also, does anyone know which ombudsman to complain to please?

There isn't an ombudsman that covers this, so the escalation route is the German ADR body mentioned earlier, unless you can convince the CAA to take it on (they generally only do so for airlines without a nominated ADR provider).

SamDude

I'm currently going through ADR for a Lufthansa delay claim. The ADR is SOP at https://soep-online.de/en/

I started my claim in September after getting a deadlock response from Lufthansa. I was expecting a response in December - but they've just sent me a holding statement by email informing me they have a long backlog due to resourcing and number of recent claims so it will take much longer, so you should get it started asap if that is what you're doing...

LawsonSteele

thanks SamDude - how do you go about checking flying weather conditions in the destinations on the cancelled date? presumably you have to quote those for the ADR SOP?

SamDude

Someone on my thread (https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6468109/proving-our-delayed-lufthansa-flight-lh1163-was-their-fault) posted a link to https://meteostat.net/en/ which lets you search historical weather data.