Get money when your flight is delayed

The future of law?

Earlier this year I had a flight delayed for 9 hours. Under EU law, you can claim up to €600 in compensation for your flight delay:

EU air passenger rights apply:

• If your flight departs from the EU (any airline), or

• If your flight arrives in the EU from outside the EU and is operated by an EU airline.

To claim compensation I used Airhelp [referral link]. I filled up the form in 10 minutes on mobile just after I landed. Today, five months later, I received my compensation! :)

I was entitled to €400 under EU law and I got €260 after Airhelp’s €140 fees. Fees are high but as AirHelp’s cofounder said:

“The airlines have notoriously made it difficult for people to claim the compensation that they are entitled to. […] It’s easy to get the upper hand on people who don’t know the law or their rights.”

Even if you can do the procedure by yourself without Airhelp and get the full compensation, I don’t know how easy and fast it is. I guess (and hope!) that the success rate is higher with Airhelp. And most importantly: it takes only 10 minutes, then you just have to wait… Some competitors have lower fees, but I don’t know if they’re good. Let me know if you’ve tried them! Also, because Airhelp is the leader of the sector they have a lot of data on flights and service quality, so they built a ranking of world’s airlines that is worth checking!

The experience on Airhelp was great. The only issue is that I’m still waiting for the compensation for the (cheap) dinner I had to buy at the airport because of the delay. So not a big deal. [Edit: Airhelp informed me the day after that the airline refused to pay this expense as they’re not obliged to do so under EU law]

I love this concept of companies that help you to know and exercise your rights. At Doctrine we know how complex the law can be for non experts (and even for experts…) so these companies address a real pain! And their success fee model is perfect for customers. There’s also DoNotPay to appeal parking tickets. Are there other similar companies? And where else this model could be applied?

Antoine