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Not a great week. 5 hours sitting in City airport waiting on a delayed BA flight, then the same time in Wroclaw waiting on Ryanair…. some weeks are not fun.
But to the point of the post, how to consider multiple causes of delay that together add up to more than 261 limits, but where some are extraordinary and some are not?
If I take the BA flight – they reported late arrival due to a power outage in Berlin. If true then somewhat outside of their control. But this short delay was made much worse by the scarcity of BA and airport staff. The one person manning the gate blamed lack of BA staff, pilot blamed lack of airport crew. Neither constitutes extraordinary. Then there is another twist – the 38°C temperature meant they needed to shed 15 PAX to get to take off weight. Weather = extraordinary, but weather that absolutely everyone had been talking about for a week and was completely expected should surely be accounted for before boarding. Even here the fact there was only one person able to make decisions (in the airport?) was the primary delay. The poor lady on the gate was asking for volunteers to remove themselves from boarding without even knowing what she could offer. Shambles.
All in all we would have been late even without the Berlin outage, but probably less than 3 hours late. As it was we were over 3 hours. I don’t know if I will chance a claim – tempting just to compare the speed of response between Ryanair and BA if submitted at the same time.
The indvidual delay elements needs to be parsed and assigned both for their extraordinaryness and also a time length.
They then add up the elements that are BAs fault and if that’s less than the compo limit then no compo
Weather is weather and even if forecast in advance is still exempt.
That makes sense. BA will be a no – Ryanair have a case to answer 🙂
although I should say that personally I am more forgiving of the Ryanair technical failure on a plane than of not foreseeing the weight limit issue at LCY in advance. A lot of passengers waited a long time to be denied at the gate. I’m sure BA sorted them out with duty of care etc. but could have done a much better job by removing them in the morning.
UPDATE: Checking bank this morning and I see Ryanair have just deposited what amounts to €250. Strangely they have not sent an email to tell me this – but thumbs up to them anyway. Exactly 3 weeks since I claimed using their own on-line tool.
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