A flight from Lisbon to Munich is cancelled two hours before departure. The airline rebooks you for the next morning, hands you a hotel voucher, and says it was "extraordinary circumstances" — a thunderstorm. You are late for a meeting, you have spent an extra night in a hotel, and nobody mentions money. Meanwhile, under EU Regulation (EC) 261/2004, that same passenger may be owed up to €600 in fixed compensation on top of the refund — but only if the cancellation was not caused by weather. The storm is exactly the kind of condition under which the advice breaks. This is a guide to where the rules hold and where they fall apart.
The one number that decides everything: distance
Under EU Regulation 261/2004, compensation for a cancelled or heavily delayed flight is a fixed amount that depends on the flight distance — not on the ticket price, not on your losses. More on the topic: “Your Flight Was Cancelled or Your Bag Vanished”.
| Flight distance | Compensation |
|---|---|
| Up to 1,500 km | €250 |
| 1,500–3,500 km | €400 |
| Over 3,500 km (including intra-EU flights over 1,500 km) | €600 |
Two things most people get wrong. First, the amount is per passenger, so a family of four on a long-haul cancellation is looking at €2,400, not €600. Second, the distance is measured by the great-circle route between the departure and arrival airports — you can compute it yourself or ask a tool to do it, but you cannot negotiate it with the airline.
The rules apply when you fly from an EU airport on any airline, or into an EU airport on an EU carrier. A London–New York flight on a US airline departing from London is covered; the same flight departing from New York is not.
"Extraordinary circumstances": the phrase that swallows your claim
Airlines reject most claims with the same sentence: "the disruption was caused by extraordinary circumstances." Under the regulation, this covers things outside the airline's control — severe weather, air traffic control strikes, political instability, a security risk. It does not cover technical faults, crew shortages, or the airline's own scheduling problems, though carriers routinely try.
The test that matters: was the cause external, unavoidable, and not something the airline could have prevented even with all reasonable measures? A bird strike is usually extraordinary. A broken engine part that the airline had months to replace is not — and courts across the EU have repeatedly said so.
If you accept the first "no" you receive, you lose. A written refusal that names the specific cause is not the end of the process — it is the document you attach to a complaint with the national enforcement body of the country where you departed or arrived. That step is entirely human: you file it yourself, online or by post, and no tool can do it for you without a configured integration.
The claim is 80% paperwork, and that is where people give up
Here is the part nobody advertises. The money is usually there; the reason people never see it is the evidence trail. By the time they are home and calm, the boarding pass is buried in an inbox, the cancellation email has been deleted, and the hotel receipt is a crumpled photo. More on the topic: “Return Money for a Lost Parcel”.
What you actually need to keep:
- the booking confirmation and the ticket number (not just the flight number);
- the boarding pass, if you were rebooked or rerouted;
- the airline's cancellation or delay notification, with the timestamp;
- receipts for meals, hotel, and transport you paid because of the disruption;
- a screenshot of the departure board showing the delay, if you can still get one.
This is a mechanical job, and it is the part an AI twin genuinely speeds up. If you grant it access to your mailbox, it can search for the booking confirmation and the cancellation email, pull the attachments, save them into one folder, and compile the whole set into a single PDF for the claim. It can also read the airline's reply, extract the stated reason and the deadline they gave you, and set a reminder for the day you must escalate. What it cannot do is walk to the airline desk in the terminal and get a stamped confirmation of the delay — that is on you, in the airport, before you leave.
A lost suitcase: different rules, different ceiling
Baggage is governed by a separate framework — the Montreal Convention — and the numbers are much less generous than people expect. The liability limit is set in Special Drawing Rights, an international currency unit, and it is revised periodically, so check the current figure rather than trusting a blog post from three years ago. In practice the ceiling sits around €1,500–€1,700 per passenger for a lost, damaged, or delayed bag. More on the topic: “Consumer Rights in Practice”.
The clock matters more than the amount. You must report the loss in writing — a Property Irregularity Report at the airport — and then file a formal claim within 7 days for damage and 21 days for delay, counted from the day you received the bag. For a bag that never arrives, the deadline is two years, but waiting is a mistake: the airline's file goes cold and receipts disappear.
If you are still abroad when the bag vanishes, you are entitled to reasonable interim expenses — clothes, toiletries, a charger. Keep every receipt. Airlines routinely reject claims without them, and a claim with receipts is a different conversation from a claim without.
What you can hand off, and what stays yours
The honest split looks like this.
| Step | Can be automated | Must be done by you |
|---|---|---|
| Find booking, ticket, cancellation email | Yes — search the mailbox, download attachments | — |
| Calculate the compensation amount by distance | Yes — arithmetic on the route | Confirm the route and passenger count |
| Draft the claim letter | Yes — a structured letter with dates and amounts | Read it, sign it |
| Track the airline's response deadline | Yes — a reminder on the date | Decide whether to escalate |
| Get a stamped delay confirmation at the airport | No | You, at the desk |
| File with the national enforcement body | No, without a configured integration | You, online or by post |
| Decide whether to accept a settlement | No | You |
For the drafting step, an AI twin with access to your documents can pull the flight details, the stated reason, and the receipts into one claim letter and save it as a PDF ready to send — the mechanical part that eats an evening. For the dispute over what counts as "extraordinary circumstances," you are on your own; that is a legal argument, and a tool does not replace a lawyer. If the amount is large or the airline keeps refusing, a specialised claims firm will take a percentage — usually a quarter to a third — which is a trade-off worth doing the arithmetic on before you sign.
When the trip collapses before you fly
A cancelled flight and a cancelled trip are different problems. If you cancel because of illness or a family emergency, the airline owes you nothing beyond its own fare rules; that is where travel insurance and, sometimes, a card chargeback come in. The mechanics of disputing a payment with your bank are a separate story, and the two routes do not stack: Chargeback vs Travel Insurance walks through which one applies to which situation. More on the topic: “Chargeback”.
There is also a quieter trap: the fare rules attached to a cheap ticket. A non-refundable fare still has to be refunded in full when the airline cancels the flight — the "non-refundable" label governs your decision to cancel, not theirs. Read the conditions before you assume you have lost the money. The same principle of reading the fine print before it costs you appears in "You Signed It, So You Agreed": Why That's Not True and What to Check in a Contract Before Signing.
The evening checklist
Sit down with your booking and answer four questions. Was the flight cancelled or delayed by more than three hours on arrival? Did you fly from or into the EU? Was the cause outside the airline's control — and can you prove it was not? Do you have the boarding pass and the notification saved?
If the first two are yes and the third is no, you have a claim. Draft it, attach the evidence, send it, and put the escalation date in your calendar. If the cause was genuinely a storm or a strike, the compensation is gone — but the refund or rebooking is still yours, and the interim expenses for a lost bag are still claimable.
Start at asibiont.com: hand the AI twin your mailbox and let it pull the booking, the cancellation email, and the receipts into one folder and one draft claim — then read it, sign it, and send it yourself.