Jersey to Newcastle discovered this week. They waited over 48 hours to escape the lovely Channel Island
after their plane resisted all efforts to be mended. Eventually a replacement Airbus was flown in from Milan
to take them to Tyneside.
Their enforced stay was funded by easyJet, which under European air passengers’ rights rules is obliged to
provide hotels and meals.
The airline must also pay compensation, set at €250 per person. One silver lining to travellers from the
slump in the pound: the amount owed by airlines that delay or cancel flights has increased in sterling terms,
and today that payment is worth £230.
Besides the accommodation costs, easyJet stands to hand out over £31,000 to passengers. In this bizarre
European legislation, payments bear little relation to the amount of upset and inconvenience endured by
passengers. That same figure would apply had the travellers been delayed by a mere three hours.
The regulations known as EU261 incentivise airlines to delay one group of passengers for days rather than
arrange a shorter wait for two planeloads.
The jinxed Jersey easyJetters may have been miffed to see, halfway through their enforced stay, an easyJet
Airbus depart from the island to Newcastle with no delay at all.
Yes: the passengers booked to fly on Tuesday eventually took off on Thursday, even though there was a
plane to their destination on Wednesday.
As with a problem, a delay shared is a delay halved. And it can also help manage expectations. Had easyJet
decided to put the Tuesday passengers on the Wednesday flight, the delayed travellers would at least be
able to predict they would be home exactly 24 hours late. Meanwhile, the Wednesday people could be
warned they were in line for a delay and therefore plan accordingly.
But you can’t fault easyJet’s logic: why pay out another £30,000-plus for a second delayed planeload when
the compensation costs for the jinxed jet will not increase whether they stay an extra day or another week?
EU261 is the sort of flawed legislation that gives the European Union a bad name, and is the process of
being reviewed in Brussels. Ironically, the UK government has assured travellers that the rules will be
replicated wholesale after Brexit (though I speculate the compensation amounts may be stipulated in
pounds or even guineas, rather than euros).
Perhaps it is because some of the European air passengers’ rights rules are so ridiculous that the airlines
have learned they can pick and choose with impunity which to ignore. Many airlines ignore the obligation
to re-route stranded travellers “at the earliest opportunity”.
While the breakdown of a Condor ferry has put pressure on flights from Jersey this week, I imagine that the
Flybe schedule to airports across the mainland would have helped the easyJet passengers get back more
quickly – flying, say, to Southampton or Bristol and flying on from there.
The Civil Aviation Authority ordered airlines to clean up their act by the end of June 2019, but I see
absolutely no evidence that they have. The law may be profoundly flawed, but this key aspect of passengers
welfare should be enforced.