Regulation (EC) No 261/2004 (Air Passenger Rights)
The European regulation that requires airlines to pay fixed compensation of 250 to 600 euros for cancellation, denied boarding or a long delay, unless extraordinary circumstances apply.
Regulation (EC) No 261/2004, in force since February 17, 2005, protects passengers departing from the European Union, or flying into it on a European airline. It combines care (meals, hotel, rerouting) with fixed compensation of 250, 400 or 600 euros depending on distance, owed without proof of loss. The airline escapes the compensation if it proves extraordinary circumstances that no reasonable measure could have avoided: weather, an air traffic control strike, a security threat. The mechanism solves an imbalance: an individual loss too small to justify a lawsuit becomes a standard claim, which collection firms aggregate. For risk, it creates a correlated charge: an IT outage, a cyberattack on a supplier or an airspace closure hits thousands of flights at once, and how the event is classified decides whether the bill exists at all.
In the Sturgeon judgment of November 19, 2009 (cases C-402/07 and C-432/07), the Court of Justice of the European Union held that passengers who reach their destination three hours or more late are entitled to the same compensation as those on a canceled flight, although the text did not provide it for delays; it confirmed this on October 23, 2012 in the Nelson judgment.
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