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Hi All, before I do the wrong thing via the Easyjet website and blindly accept what I am being told by Easyjet, which is hardly likely to be independant advice, can anyone advise what my rights are please? Probably easiest to summarise.
Booked Easyjet return Manchester to Olbia x 2 seats – outbound Sat 2/4, return 9/4. Flew out on time, so far so good….
Email from Easyjet weds 6/4 advising flight back cancelled. We are on holiday, we do not expect or check emails daily, so didnt see this until Thursday evening. The email suggested I had three options below
1. You can switch to another flight for free
2. You can get a voucher for the full value of your booking
3. You can get a refund for the full value of your booking
On the EJ website “manage booking”, no option came up for any alternative flight, presumably on the basis that EJ only fly to/from Sardinia Olbiaonce daily on thursdays and saturdays. I could not contact EJ customer services via their chatbot or via telephone from Sardinia on Thursday despite multiple attempts
I had to be back at work on Monday so this isnt an option anyway, even if we could secure our villa for another few days (we couldn’t it was fully booked)
Therefore went exploring options for alternative flights back on 9/4 either with different airlines or with split flights
Got two of the last three seats according to the EJ website and bought Easyjet from Olbia to Milan and again Easyjet onward from Milan to Manchester but had to pay for these, plus the same walk on baggage extras
Hoping someone here can help with these questions
I assume I am entitled to a refund from Easyjet in some form or other. The only thing I saw on their website was a refund of the original cancelled flights. Am I entititled to reimbursement of the cost of the two flights Olbia to Milan and Milan to Manchester as combined they cost a lot more than the original
Am I entitled to reimbursement of the original direct flights
As I arranged the only flights back that gave any chance of getting to Manchester on 9/4, we had to leave approx 6 hours earlier than planned, and we got back to Manchester approx 4 hours earlier than planned- There is a lot of info about delayed flights, but not about earliy flights. Does the automatic compensation apply? If so roughly how much? Distance in KM is over 1500km and less than 2000km
Am I missing anything else here?
I want to get this sorted as reasonably and quickly as possible but the options on the Easyjet website didnt seem to cover anyone being proactive and sorting out a way of getting home themselves.
Thank you in anticipationThis isn’t very nice of Easyjet is it? To leave you stranded on holiday.
Keep good hold of records of your attempts to reach them.
They owe you all of:-
Refund of your entire rerouting costs back via Milan both legs. You definitely took a very reasonable alternative, they’re lucky it was on their flights as with closer timing to your original flight you could have come back on other far more expensive airlines via Rome or other places if needed to get you back to work on time. Personally i wouldn’t have been willing to leave so much earlier.You are entitled to 400 euros per for each journey over 1500km that is cancelled ie Olbia to Man (even if the original journey had been made up of connecting flights and both got cancelled then just 1 compensation). I am not sure of the £ equivalent in the Uk equivalent of EU261 it’s £320 or £350 I think.
You are also entitled to meals and refreshments at appropriate times if the reroute forced you to have a longer journey. This is duty of care under same legislation. Submit receipts no alcohol, no cigars, no caviar.
Easyjet can’t get out of any of this. I think there’s a place to claim under ‘Disruption’ on their website. All the above, per seat.
Easyjet has done some sneaky things on some rounds of cancellations. Theit software is better than BA’s I think and perfectly capable of showing you the next available flight and prompting you to accept it if they want to. I doubt the next flight a few days later was full but suspect they didn’t want to encourage people to claim duty of care meals, a few hotel nights transport to and from hotel and internet they’d have been liable for if you’d really had to wait for their own next flight. Given the price accommodation in Sardinia can reach I’d guess your rerouting has worked out a lot cheaper for them.
Let us kmow how it goes.
PS don’t accept a refund of the original flights as this secures the usually higher cost of rerouting and duty of care. When you take a refund the airline doesn’t have to pay for these.
I really sympathise here and endorse LL’s excellent advice (as usual). I’ve found EJ has really gone downhill in the past couple of months after being great with us during the pandemic. I’ve been unable to complete check in for my 16 year old son and there’s no indication whatsoever, anywhere on the EJ website why this might be. After trawling the internet for old posts on Trip Advisor and mum’s net I eventually worked out that it’s because when the flights were originally booked, he was only 15 and therefore we need to pay APD for him. In the meantime I had been asking EJ on FB, Twitter, via their online form and via their CS email and got nothing back apart from a list of FAQs which didn’t cover our issue! Finally got an email back telling us we will have to call and pay the APD but I’m annoyed that I’ve now got to call a premium number and no doubt have to wait for ages due to them being busy when it would be so simple to do this online!
No it’s not that simple online in this type of case. ISTR BA struggles too with age changes needing reroutes.
You do not have to use a premium rate number to call Easyjet. There are non premium numbers. Legally companies have been obliged for over 5 years now, to provide a number that is not charged at any more than local call rate to existing customers to reach them. Easyjet like a lot of companies may skate around the implied requirement to make this number easy for customers to find.
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Thanks LL, I’ll have a look for a suitable number. Surely they could have just asked for payment details via email though? It seems a lot of hassle for an extra £15 or whatever it is.
@Lady London I’m not sure you are correct here about the duty of care if you go off and make your own arrangements as discussed in another thread today per the EU261 Interpretative Guidelines at 4.2:-
“However, where an air carrier can demonstrate that when the passenger has accepted to give his or her personal contact details, it has contacted a passenger and sought to provide the assistance required by Article 8, but the passenger has nonetheless made his or her own assistance or re-routing arrangements, then the air carrier may conclude that it is not responsible for any additional costs the passenger has incurred and may decide not to reimburse them.”
It may therefore require an insurance claim. There is also the tension within the statute that if you cancel your booking for a refund you definitely lose your rights, but if you are a no show on a re-booking/routing your refund entitlement may be lost. You may recall a similar incident reported here recently from IOM (an overnight delay rather than cancellation) which EasyJet won at ADR, but the pax’s insurance paid on a goodwill basis.
@Lady London I’m not sure you are correct here about the duty of care if you go off and make your own arrangements as discussed in another thread today per the EU261 Interpretative Guidelines at 4.2:-
“However, where an air carrier can demonstrate that when the passenger has accepted to give his or her personal contact details, it has contacted a passenger and sought to provide the assistance required by Article 8, but the passenger has nonetheless made his or her own assistance or re-routing arrangements, then the air carrier may conclude that it is not responsible for any additional costs the passenger has incurred and may decide not to reimburse them.”
It may therefore require an insurance claim. There is also the tension within the statute that if you cancel your booking for a refund you definitely lose your rights, but if you are a no show on a re-booking/routing your refund entitlement may be lost. You may recall a similar incident reported here recently from IOM (an overnight delay rather than cancellation) which EasyJet won at ADR, but the pax’s insurance paid on a goodwill basis.
Manage booking referred to in the email didn’t offer a reroute. Passenger’s reroute choice was as close to same timing as possible and he used the link but the link and website was not offering his choice. Passenger also tried to reach Easyjet by phone, more than once, amongst his holiday movements/locations and activities. So I think he’s done enough. The way the Easyjet website works, he’d have had to pay for those flights, Easyjet hadn’t offered them as a reroute so there was no other path to do this.
Easyjet dumped the passenger on an island halfway through his holiday. The passenger had no reason to imagine Easyjet would do this.
How much time is the passenger supposed to spend out of his holiday trying to accommodate Easyjet? Passenger had a hard stop he must be at work. Passenger made enough effort. If he could have got through by telephone, I know Easyjet well and I am certain the Easyjet telephone agent would have provided that reroute via Milan for free. But passenger could not reach them by telephone and the website did not provide the reroute without his having to pay. I think Easyjet is d-mn lucky passenger was willing to cut short his holiday to accommodate the notably earlier connecting flight via Milan. Easyjet could easily have ended up paying out cash cost of a much more expensive ticket on another airline possibly requiring a hotel ovenight cost dinner and breakfast cost as well, before a very early connection back to work in time the following morning.
Passenger was fully entitled to reroute himself especially in the exigent circumstances of needing to be certain of being back at work on time, Easyjet links and website not providing the reroute as such, and being unable to contact Easyjet.
Never forget Easyjet abandoned this passenger for their own commercial reaasons.
I think he’s covered.
It is quite possible he is covered, but in effect, on your basis, he is falling back on EasyJet’s goodwill and/or an arbitrator’s subjective view rather than statute. The pax is therefore at risk of not getting his flights refunded or accommodation covered by virtue of not speaking to the airline. Hopefully he will, but if anyone goes off and does their own thing, they need to do so in the knowledge that there is a risk they won’t get compensated. If you want certainty and/or can’t afford the loss, you need to let the airline do the rebooking, however difficult that may be. In this instance it certainly helps that the passenger’s self re-route is with EasyJet but against that I didn’t notice any mention of attempting to contact the airline locally and EasyJet’s EU261 team is very familiar in dealing with this particular issue.
I would have done exactly the same as the pax and hoped to sort the compensation later, but however sympathetic one is about this situation, the statute is surprisingly unsympathetic for these circumstances when it is so favourable in other ways.
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Thanks for the quick and thorough responses. There seems to be a split of opinion on whether I’m relying on the goodwill of Easyjet or actually have statutory UK legal rights, even if
Easyjet customer services phone number didnt pick up / didnt work at all, and the live chat was useless for anything not fitting the FAQ
EJs website offered no alternative flight routing
EJ cancelled our flight home before we set out to the airport to fly home, therefore by inference, it would be surely pointless to drive to the airport when our flight home had already been cancelled
Based on the above, and unless I’ve misunderstood whats in the responses above, I’m somewhat at a loss as to what else I could reasonably have done or was supposed to do under the circumstances. Equally, I don’t know whether “Article 8” referred to in the above requires but from a common sense point of view ( does common sense apply ever?) I’m not sure whether sending a single email with a website link complies with the requirement for the airline to say that “it has contacted a passenger and sought to provide the assistance required by Article 8” – based on my experience, it didn’t seek to give me much if any practical assistance that was in any way useful in getting us back to the UK!
Surely this situation, and me being proactive in trying to resolve it in the best way possible should absolutely not be reliant on the goodwill of Easyjet?@Chris_K1000 – I’m sorry, you are in an invidious position, but I hope EasyJet will do the right thing and refund you, but if they won’t and confirm this in a writing, travel insurance is your next port of call as the statute is regrettably not your friend here.
In any event, make a note now, of all the failed attempts to contact EasyJet. I did note your bolded ‘practical’ which is obviously the common sense approach but there is a bit of a lacuna in the statute as it didn’t really contemplate not being able to contact the airline, them leaving you in the lurch and the obvious desire of a passenger just to sort out getting home now and dealing with the costs later.
On a more general note, there is a lot of advice here about passenger rights, but the situations people present are often a little grey and require people to take the risk of incurring costs, then definitively telling them they will get it back, even though it requires the subjective decision of an arbitrator or judge to go your way. Some people can’t afford that risk, so the advice needs to be more caveated or nuanced.
I take the example of my son, he is a constant traveller, but is on a graduate starter salary that is quite a stretch for a job in London. He buys incredibly cheap BA or LCC tickets to interesting places, usually staying in very cheap Airbnb’s, so is spending maybe €100-120 for weekend flights and accommodation, so if this happens to him, he just can’t afford to pay say €250 tickets home that he might not get back because he made his own arrangements.
Whatever advice people on here kindly offer should reflect this as we clearly have a very mixed audience with some spending hours chasing £5 Amex credits and others telling us £500/day F&B budget in the Maldives is really good value.
- This reply was modified 55 years, 4 months ago by .
I agree 100% with your comments
Some posters here are too quick to respond to queries with such certainty it makes me wonder what secret info they may have to be so certain and how they assume – as you raise – that people can afford to pay out several hundred let alone thousands of pounds and then have to wait months for a CEDR or MCOL case to be resolved or for an airline to reimburse them.
A few weeks ago I was ludicrously accused of being a shill for BA becauae I gave a different interpretation to the regulation then theirs – laughable especially as I had commented based on what the poster had posted not what I assumed they had posted.
The £5 Amex credit people and the £500/day Maldives ones are often one and the same!
But if nobody seriously challenges the airlines they are going to continue wriggling out of their obligations by simply making themselves uncontactable.
The £5 Amex credit people and the £500/day Maldives ones are often one and the same!
But if nobody seriously challenges the airlines they are going to continue wriggling out of their obligations by simply making themselves uncontactable.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting not challenging the airlines – far from it.
It is more that a great many cases simply are not as black and white as the advice suggests and the advice involves the OP being advised to take financial risk without either ascertaining they can take such risk or even advising that there is a risk. ‘Slam dunk’ cases are exceptionally rare – most could go either way at CEDR/MCOL. We have all been pleased by this week’s CEDR win, but we had a case lost a week or two before on fairly similar facts. I fear that many lost cases don’t get reported as they sometimes provide more help to avoid disappointment/pitfalls than the winners.
- This reply was modified 55 years, 4 months ago by .
The £5 Amex credit people and the £500/day Maldives ones are often one and the same!
But if nobody seriously challenges the airlines they are going to continue wriggling out of their obligations by simply making themselves uncontactable.
I am sure that reasonble efforts are sufficient.The OP said enough to make it clear he’d followed the link he received from Easyjet advising the cancellation to ‘Manage Disruption’ but the link and nothing provided on the website let him exercise the choice he had a right to which was to reroute his cancelled flightbas near as possible to the time of the cancelled flight. He even tried to contact Easyjet who did not answer their phone which not everybody who is on holiday could be expected to be in a position to do.
The OP described his efforts in such a way it seems clesr he can prove he tried. Ideal would be 3 calls hanging around for substantial periods not answered but he’s on holiday, his flight is cancelled on a Sunday abd there’s a planeload of people chasing a fixed number of seats off the island to get home in time for work. Of course he had no choice but to take his own action.
I agree that Easyjet may have a sleazy claim processor but this is actually pretty straightforward assuming OP has proof.
The £5 Amex credit people and the £500/day Maldives ones are often one and the same!
But if nobody seriously challenges the airlines they are going to continue wriggling out of their obligations by simply making themselves uncontactable.
I am sure that reasonable efforts are sufficient.The OP said enough to make it clear he’d followed the link he received from Easyjet advising the cancellation to ‘Manage Disruption’ (which is what Easyjet calls MMB) but the link and nothing provided on the website let him exercise the choice he had a right to which was to reroute his cancelled flight as near as possible to the time of the cancelled flight. He even tried to contact Easyjet who did not answer their phone which not everybody who is on holiday could be expected to be in a position to do.
The OP described his efforts in such a way it seems clear he can prove he tried. Ideal would be 3 calls hanging around for substantial periods not answered but he’s on holiday, his flight is cancelled on a Sunday and there’s a planeload of people chasing a fixed number of seats off the island to get home in time for work. Of course he had no choice but to take his own action.
I agree that Easyjet may have a sleazy claim processor but this is actually pretty straightforward assuming OP has proof.
I agree 100% with your comments
Some posters here are too quick to respond to queries with such certainty it makes me wonder what secret info they may have to be so certain and how they assume – as you raise – that people can afford to pay out several hundred let alone thousands of pounds and then have to wait months for a CEDR or MCOL case to be resolved or for an airline to reimburse them.
A few weeks ago I was ludicrously accused of being a shill for BA becauae I gave a different interpretation to the regulation then theirs – laughable especially as I had commented based on what the poster had posted not what I assumed they had posted.
Who called you a shill for BA, ChrisC? I see nothing wrong with someone who is loyal to a past or present employer or a company that might be having a blip that someone has admiration for. And shill is a very insulting word.
I fear that many lost cases don’t get reported as they sometimes provide more help to avoid disappointment/pitfalls than the winners.
I doubt that — people are more likely to complain when they loose than crow when they win, in my experience. I think politicians work on this basis when planning policy changes.
I’m going to hope that EJ play nicely and see what happens but I’m going to stick a claim in for the full cost of the alternative flights (which to be fair, is even easier for EJ to check as they are with them too, so it will be pretty hard surely to say we hadnt made decent attempt to mitigate our extra costs). We have annual travel insurance to fall back upon as well. It’s just a pain and could be made so much simpler…
It didnt occur to me to take screen shots either when trying to call them or use their chatbot. I suspect that its quite tricky trying to do it on a phone in a bar with a totally stressed out spouse, and even back at the villa and a far more suitable laptop that I only took by chance, it didint occur to me. Hey ho… here’s hoping a reasonable response from EJ is forthcoming.
“Proof” therefore will be my word vs theirs but the flight schedules / costs hopefully will be sufficient.
Thank you all for your fantastic help, especially on a digital detox Sunday 🙂
It didnt occur to me to take screen shots either when trying to call them or use their chatbot. I suspect that its quite tricky trying to do it on a phone in a bar with a totally stressed out spouse, and even back at the villa and a far more suitable laptop that I only took by chance, it didint occur to me. Hey ho… here’s hoping a reasonable response from EJ is forthcoming.
“Proof” therefore will be my word vs theirs but the flight schedules / costs hopefully will be sufficient.
You can take screenshots of your browser history and phone records *now*. This is useful evidence to back up ‘your word’.
Quick Update; Dealing with Easyjet is like pulling teeth. Intentionally they make it so hard to speak to anyone remotely informed they should be renamed “Difficultjet” . However, I now have a refund of my flights back via Milan at least. EC261 still ongoing but on the basis that they paid the alternative flights, legally i dont see they have a leg to stand on… Will update when something changes.
Thank you to those who responded and gave valuable advice in the meantime, especially Lady London 🙂That’s partly good news. Glad you got your flight costs refunded. I’d have been amazed if EasyJet had denied liability.
As for EC261 have you been told why the oroginal flight was cancelled? Legally the airline is obliged to explain the reason.
Unless the flight was cancelled due to extraordinary circumstances you should get compensation in addition to the refund. Do not let them off the hook. I suspect that in refunding your extra flight costs they are hoping you will go away.
+1 @AJA’s right. Be relentless to get all the rest of what’s owed to you still.
Hi All
Final-ish update. After much wrangling and pointless argument, Easyjet recompensed expenses for both alternative flights for us via Milan, allowing us to get home same weekend.
They also agreed the EC 261 statutory compensation for us both, again with considerably delay and pointless argument, especially when they rejected my wifes having approved mine, which is utterly ludicrous.
It took approx 20-25 hours of my life and a lot of phone calls and emails to resolve and approx 9-10 weeks of unneccessary wrangling with imbeciles from Easyjet who dont follow their own website advice, let alone the law!Thank you for all your advice and in particular to Lady London for her wisdom and knowledge, and advice to keep on challenging
Thanks for the update and it’s good to hear that your perseverance came through. It shouldn’t take that amount of time.
It is also timely as I’ve just returned after a cancellation last night on the easyJet Nice-Manchester route, although this appears to be due to weather related/ATC restrictions/crew time. I may have to go the insurance route to get reimbursed for the reroute today with Vuelling via BCN.
The details given in this type of thread are extremely useful when in a pickle, thanks to all.
Thanks for letting us all on here know you got your claim paid in the end Chris_K1000.
As @JDB warned,you were a bit lucky as it’s so important to keep the best possible proof as you make the various attempts to get the airline to provide your reroute and duty of care. But you did a good catchup and gathered together enough proof and I am glad to see your persistence paid off.
The sums here to reroute yourself when you couldn’t reach Easyjet to get them to reroute you were also not small and so @ChrisC’s warning that there is always still a risk is indeed correct.
Thanks again for letting us know what it took but you got there in the end.
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