Staff Reporter
IF you’ve ever suffered a severe delay to a flight, you will no doubt have been encouraged to seek compensation for your troubles. But as one Swiss Airlines passenger has just found out, there is also money to be recovered if your flight is earlier than you expected.
A court in Malaga has just ordered Swiss International Airlines to pay compensation of €600 to a passenger whose flight was brought forward by more than an hour.
The online website reclamador.es, which seeks compensation on behalf of citizens, told Andalucia Informacion that the man had been advised of the change to his flight with more than two weeks’ notice.
But it did so through an intermediary, the online travel agency eDreams. As a result, it was liable for the changes for having not directly notified the customer.
The passenger in question arrived at his destination more than two hours earlier than he had planned to. According to reclamador.es, he had bought his ticket at that time for a specific reason, and the earlier journey caused him a series of inconveniences.
“Despite notice of a cancellation more than 14 days in advance, there is also a right to compensation if this notice was given to an intermediary and it is proven that it was not given to the client directly,” Jorge Ramos, a lawyer from reclamador.es, told Andalucia Informacion.
“In this case, the travel agency was notified, but the client contracted the basic eDreams service, which did not include notifications of flight changes,” he added.
The ruling from the Malaga court is in line with criteria from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which has issued a series of rulings in recent years that are aimed at protecting the rights of airline passengers.
