European Parliament rejects flight delay compensation rule change

Members of the European Parliament voting in Strasbourg, eastern France, yesterday. Photo / Frederick Florin, AFP

The European Parliament has rejected plans to allow airlines to incur longer flight delays before having to compensate passengers, locking horns with member states that have backed the move.

MPs in Strasbourg, eastern France, overwhelmingly voted to maintain the current system, which allows for compensation when a flight is delayed by more than three hours.

They also voted, by 632 to 15, for airlines to include carry-on luggage in the price of a ticket and to ban them from charging parents to get seats next to their children.

The vote leaves a European Union push to reform so-called air passenger rights at an impasse.

At present, passengers in Europe have a right to between €250 and €600 (NZ$500-$1200) in compensation, depending on flight distance, for delays of three hours or more.

Airlines say that leaves them with a hefty bill, and often leads them to cancel flights rather than run them with a long delay, because of knock-on effects on flight schedules.

A majority of the EU’s 27 states agreed last year to extend the threshold to four hours for flights of up to 3500km or for any flights within the EU, and to six hours for longer journeys.

Payout amounts were also revised to between €300 and €500.

The scheme came with rights for passengers to be rerouted at the earliest opportunity, and for them to be automatically compensated for flights cancelled within 14 days of departure.

But that was not good enough for Parliament.

As MPs and member states have to agree on the same text for a reform to move forward, a “conciliation committee” will now be convened to try to find a compromise.

Andrey Novakov, a Bulgarian MP with the centre-right EPP grouping, who sponsored the Parliament’s text, told AFP that MPs were ready to negotiate.

But a no-deal, which would simply leave the current rules in place, would be better than what member states had proposed, he added.

“No agreement is better than the council position,” he said before the vote, arguing that the text approved by member states was “not protecting the passengers at all”.

- Agence France-Presse