Flight Cancellation Compensation: The Two Regimes

Cancellation is the disruption where the two regimes diverge most sharply, and where a passenger who assumes the wrong one wastes months. Under the retained UK Regulation a cancellation can carry a fixed payment that has nothing to do with the ticket price, subject to two tests: how much notice you were given, and whether the airline can prove the cause was outside its control. Under the US rules a cancellation carries a refund and nothing more. Everything else follows from which of those two sentences describes your flight.

Notice is the first test, and it is measured in days

The UK Regulation sets the compensation right for a cancellation and then removes it in three defined situations, all of them about notice. Two weeks or more before departure and nothing is owed. Between two weeks and seven days, nothing is owed if the re-routing offered keeps the departure within two hours of the original and the arrival within four. Inside seven days, the same idea with tighter windows: one hour early, two hours late. The article is worth reading in full because the arithmetic is exact and airlines apply it correctly more often than passengers expect.

The burden of proof about notice sits with the airline

A passenger who cannot remember when the email arrived is in a better position than they think. The Regulation says in terms that the burden of proving whether and when the passenger was informed of the cancellation rests with the operating air carrier. That reverses the usual position in a consumer dispute: the airline has to produce its record, and an airline that cannot is left arguing about a date it must evidence. It is one of the few provisions here that a claimant can use as a shield rather than a sword.

The extraordinary-circumstances defence, and its limits

The airline is not obliged to pay compensation if it can prove the cancellation was caused by extraordinary circumstances which could not have been avoided even if all reasonable measures had been taken. Both halves of that sentence carry weight: the circumstance must be extraordinary, and the airline must also show it could not have worked around it. Note what the defence does not touch. It removes the compensation only. The right to a refund or re-routing, and the right to meals and a hotel while you wait, survive a storm intact, and a passenger told that weather means they get nothing has been told something the Regulation does not say.

In the United States the answer is your money, promptly

A cancelled US flight entitles the passenger to a full and prompt refund of the airfare, taxes and ancillary fees included, where they choose not to take the alternative offered. The regulation calls this automatic, and it applies to a nonrefundable ticket. There is no fixed sum on top, no distance band and no notice test, because there is no compensation right for the notice test to qualify. A US passenger arguing about how much warning they had is arguing about something their own rules do not measure.

Questions people ask about flight cancellation compensation

How much is flight cancellation compensation in the UK?

The Regulation sets it by distance rather than ticket price, in three bands, and the exact figures are quoted with their source on the United Kingdom jurisdiction page of this site. A cheap seat and an expensive one on the same cancelled flight are worth the same.

I was told two months in advance. Is anything owed?

Not by way of compensation. Two weeks is the outer limit, so two months' notice puts the cancellation outside the payment right entirely. You still choose between a refund and re-routing.

Does a strike count as an extraordinary circumstance?

It depends on whose strike it is, and the Regulation does not list examples. What it requires is proof by the airline both that the circumstance was extraordinary and that it could not have been avoided by all reasonable measures. That is a question about evidence, which is why it is worth putting to the airline in writing and then to an ADR scheme rather than settling it from a website.

Can I claim compensation and a refund?

They are separate rights in the UK Regulation and answer different questions: the refund or re-routing puts you back where you started or gets you where you were going, and the compensation is a fixed sum for the disruption itself. A cancellation inside the notice window with no valid defence can carry both.

Flight cancellation compensation: a fixed sum in the UK, your fare back in the US