The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled in a judgment handed down on Thursday, 22 April, that the diversion of a flight to an airport serving the same city, town, or region does not entitle the passenger to compensation as for a cancelled flight (case C-826/19).
A passenger was claiming a lump-sum compensation of €250 from Austrian Airlines under Regulation 261/2004 on compensation and assistance to passengers for the diversion of his Vienna-Berlin flight, which landed almost an hour late at Berlin Schönefeld Airport instead of Berlin Tegel Airport. The airline did not offer him any additional transport or cover the cost of transferring between the two airports. Berlin Tegel is located in the Land of Berlin, and Berlin Schönefeld, in the neighbouring Land of Brandenburg.
In its judgment, the CJEU ruled in favour of Austrian Airlines on the question of the denial of lump-sum compensation. The court specifies that for the alternative airport to be considered as serving the same city, town, or region, it must be in “close proximity” to that territory, without necessarily being located in the same administrative territory.
However, the European court considers air passengers to be entitled to compensation when they arrive at the final destination—the originally planned destination airport or another nearby destination agreed with the passenger—three hours or more after the originally scheduled time.
In order to be exempted from its obligation to compensate passengers in the event of a long delay of an arriving flight, an airline may claim extraordinary circumstances that affected not the delayed flight but a previous flight operated by the airline with the same aircraft three flights back in the rotation sequence for that aircraft, provided that there is a direct causal link between the occurrence of that circumstance and the long delay of the later flight.
Finally, the court has decided that it is for the airline to offer, on its own initiative, to bear the cost of transferring the passenger to the originally planned destination airport or, if necessary, another nearby destination agreed with the passenger. Otherwise, the passenger is entitled to reimbursement of the amounts which, in the light of the specific circumstances of each case, prove necessary, appropriate, and reasonable.
See the judgment [in French]: https://bit.ly/32PVI5n (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)