Meals, hotels and phone calls: your care rights during disruption

When does care start?

Art. 6 sets the trigger by expected departure delay, scaled to distance. Cancellations and denied boarding carry care immediately under Articles 4 and 5.

What exactly does care include?

• Meals and refreshments in a reasonable relation to the waiting time (Art. 9(1)(a)).
• Hotel accommodation where a stay of one or more nights becomes necessary, or a stay additional to what you planned (Art. 9(1)(b)).
• Transport between the airport and the accommodation, both ways (Art. 9(1)(c)).
• Two telephone calls, or two messages by fax or email, free of charge (Art. 9(2)).

The ash cloud precedent: care with no ceiling

In April 2010 the Eyjafjallajökull eruption closed much of European airspace, and Ms McDonagh spent about a week stranded in Faro after Ryanair cancelled her Dublin flight. Ryanair argued that an event of that scale went beyond extraordinary circumstances into something so severe that even the care duty should fall away.

The Court refused to invent that category in January 2013. Airspace closure after an eruption is an extraordinary circumstance, so no compensation; but the Art. 9 duty runs for the entire period the passenger waits for rerouting, with no temporal or monetary limit anywhere in the regulation. The duty exists precisely for the moments when the disruption is nobody's fault.

Where the airline fails to provide, the passenger who paid their own way recovers the sums that prove necessary, appropriate and reasonable, assessed by the national court. That formula is the receipts test: a sandwich and a mid range hotel clear it comfortably, a tasting menu may not.

Care and compensation are strangers to each other

The two duties run on different clocks, answer different needs, and neither offsets the other. A meal voucher at the gate does not reduce a £350 compensation claim on a London Gatwick to Málaga-Costa del Sol cancellation, and a paid compensation claim does not settle an unreimbursed hotel night. Sousa Rodríguez added a boundary from the other side in 2011: care costs the airline should have covered are claimed as care costs under Articles 8 and 9, not smuggled into further compensation under Art. 12.

A worked overnight example

A Edinburgh to Dublin departure (336 km, care from 2 hours) is pushed from 21.40 to 09.10 the next morning. From 23.40 the airline owes food and drink; once the delay makes a night necessary it owes the hotel and both transfers; and two calls or emails are covered throughout. If the flight then lands 3 hours or more behind its original schedule and the cause was within the airline's control, the £220 compensation stacks on top of every reimbursed receipt.

If the airline hands you nothing at the desk: book modestly, keep every receipt, and claim the outlay back alongside the compensation assessment. The claim letter tool includes the care request wording.

Scale the same example up and the principle holds. Had that departure slipped by two days in a mass disruption, the hotel nights would simply multiply: the Court held McDonagh's passenger entitled to a week of accommodation and meals after an ash cloud closure, and the Court declined to draw a line anywhere short of what the wait actually required. Length can excuse compensation; it does not dilute care.

Care by disruption type

Does care depend on where you were flying?

Care follows coverage, not geography beyond it: any departure from the UK, EU or EEA is covered, and an arrival into them from elsewhere is covered where a UK or EU carrier operated. Outside coverage, whatever the airline provides is goodwill or its own conditions of carriage, not Art. 9. Within coverage the duty is uniform: the same meals and hotel rules apply at a home hub and at an outstation where the airline has no staff of its own.

The five hour escape hatch

Care keeps you fed while you wait; from 5 hours of delay you no longer have to wait at all. Art. 8(1)(a) opens at that point whatever the distance: reimbursement within seven days of the ticket price for the parts of the journey not made, and for parts already made where the trip no longer serves its original purpose, together with a return flight to your first point of departure when relevant.

The choice is genuinely yours. A passenger five hours down at a connecting airport can take the reimbursement and the return flight home rather than press on to a meeting that has already happened. Taking that option ends the journey and the care that came with it; until you take it, the meals and, if needed, the hotel keep accruing.

What does reasonable actually mean?

Three words carry the whole reimbursement standard: sums that prove necessary, appropriate and reasonable to make up for the airline's failure, assessed by the national court. In McDonagh that meant a week of accommodation, meals and transport for a passenger the airline had left entirely to herself; the scale of the outlay was driven by the scale of the failure, and it was recoverable.

The standard also has edges. Costs you would have incurred anyway are not the airline's; an upgrade chosen for comfort rather than necessity invites a court to trim it; and the two communications in Art. 9(2) are two, not unlimited roaming charges. Claim what the situation genuinely required, evidenced, and the formula works in your favour.

Who actually provides it on the day

The duty belongs to the operating air carrier, wherever the disruption happens. At its home base that usually looks like vouchers and a hotel desk; at an outstation it is often a handling agent acting for the airline, and in a mass disruption it can be nobody at all. The regulation does not excuse an overwhelmed desk: where provision fails, self help plus receipts stands in, on the McDonagh reimbursement standard.

Care also does not wait for fault to be established. The duty starts the moment the delay thresholds are crossed, while the cause is still being argued about, which is why keeping the receipts is worth doing even when the compensation claim looks doubtful.

Two communications: the forgotten right

Art. 9(2) is one sentence and almost nobody uses it: passengers shall be offered, free of charge, two telephone calls, telex or fax messages, or emails. Written in 2004, it reads quaintly now, but the duty is current law and matters at exactly the moments it was written for: a dead phone battery, no roaming, a call that has to happen. Ask at the desk; where the airline provides nothing and the call costs you money, it belongs on the receipts pile with the meals.

Where care claims go wrong

• Vouchers confused with waivers: accepting a meal voucher waives nothing.
• Receipts not kept: the reimbursement standard is evidenced necessity, and memory is not a receipt.
• Luxury substitutions: necessary, appropriate and reasonable is a modest standard, and courts apply it as one.
• Care claimed as Art. 12 damages: Sousa Rodríguez routes it through Articles 8 and 9 instead.
• Waiting for permission: when the desk provides nothing, the duty does not lapse, it converts into reimbursement.