Claiming yourself or using a company: the honest comparison

Route one: claim directly with the airline

Every airline in scope must handle compensation claims, and Art. 14 obliges it to tell you your rights in writing during the disruption. The claim itself is a short factual demand: flight, date, disruption, arrival delay, the articles relied on, and a request for the specific Art. 5(3) circumstance if the airline intends to rely on one. Our free claim letter generator produces exactly that letter, unbranded, with the citations filled in; it runs entirely in your browser and sends us nothing.

Two practical notes. First, address the operating carrier, which on code shares and packages is the airline that actually flew (Wirth, 2018). Second, nothing obliges you to accept vouchers: Art. 7(3) requires money unless you sign otherwise.

If the airline says no or says nothing

Three escalation routes exist, and this guide describes rather than prescribes them. A complaint to the national enforcement body under Art. 16, whose contact details the airline must include in its written notice, records the infringement and costs nothing, though in many countries the body polices airlines rather than awarding your individual payout. Approved alternative dispute resolution schemes decide individual cases against member airlines. And the courts of the forum decide contested claims definitively, on the national limitation clocks: 6 years in England and Wales, 1 to 10 years across the published map.

Route two: what a company like ours actually does

We assess the claim against the same rule set this site publishes, demand in your name under a signed authority, argue the Art. 5(3) points against the case law, and where an airline holds out, instruct lawyers and carry the court costs. If the claim fails, you pay nothing. If it pays, we keep 30 percent.

The honest corollary: on a claim the airline was going to accept anyway, our fee buys convenience rather than necessity. Where the service earns its fee is the contested middle: extraordinary circumstances letters that do not survive scrutiny, carriers that answer nobody, and claims worth pursuing to court where an individual filing fee and the risk feel disproportionate to €250.

The demand itself cites the same articles and judgments this site publishes, because there is no secret argument in this field: the law is public, the case law is public, and what a company adds is persistence, process and the willingness to litigate at its own cost. Judged on that description, the fee either makes sense for your claim or it does not, and both answers are fine with us.

The numbers, side by side

Questions worth asking any claims company

• The fee, all in: is the percentage on the compensation, and are court and legal costs inside it?
• What happens on failure: does no win no fee mean literally nothing to pay?
• Where do the legal claims in their marketing come from: are the rules published and sourced anywhere you can check?
• Assignment or authority: are you signing your claim away outright, or authorising them to act for you?

Every route, compared

The direct claim, step by step

• 1. Gather the basics: booking reference, flight number, date, and your actual arrival time. The airline holds the flight record, so approximate memory is workable.
• 2. Generate the letter: the free tool fills in the articles, the band for your distance, and the request for the specific Art. 5(3) circumstance. It runs in your browser; nothing is sent to us.
• 3. Send it to the operating carrier, through its claims form or complaints address, and keep the submission receipt.
• 4. Read the reply against this site: the stated reason has usually been litigated already, and the rulings library will tell you where it landed.
• 5. Diarise the reply. Airlines set their own response practices, so give it a sensible interval, then treat silence as a refusal and pick an escalation route while the limitation clock is still comfortable.
• 6. If refused or ignored, the routes above are open, and so are we; a refusal letter is a normal starting point for our process, not the end of one.

Authority or assignment: read what you sign

Companies in this market work on one of two legal footings. An authority means the claim stays yours and the company acts for you in your name; that is our model, under a signed mandate. An assignment transfers the claim itself to the company, which then sues in its own name; several of the leading judgments, Airhelp v Laudamotion and Touristic Aviation among them, were brought exactly that way, and the Court has treated assigned claims identically on the substantive rules.

Neither footing is wrong, but they answer differently to the question whose claim is it now. Whichever provider you consider, the answer should be findable in its terms before you sign, along with the fee and what happens on failure.

The claims we do not take

Honesty about the model includes its edges. Our rule set declines claims outside the coverage rules, and refers out claims close to their limitation bar rather than taking them on: a claim that has to be issued in court within months needs a litigator on day one, not a demand letter cycle. The referral gates are published in the open rules dataset, so this behaviour is checkable rather than asserted.

At the small end of the ladder, arithmetic deserves honesty too: 30 percent of a €250 short haul claim is €75, and a confident claimant with an accepted claim may reasonably prefer to keep it. The service prices the contested cases, where the alternative is not a free win but giving up.

What we publish so you can check us

Marketing in this market is cheap, so we put the checkable parts in public. The rule set our assessments run on is downloadable as JSON, with the bands, thresholds, eligibility gates and the full limitation map in the form the engine evaluates. The time limits table states the source status of every row, including the ones counsel has not yet reviewed. The fee is on the fees page as one number, and this guide's own payout arithmetic is computed from it at build time.

That transparency is also the honest pitch for the direct route: everything needed to claim alone is on these pages, free, with the citations attached. If the airline folds at the first letter, you did not need us; if it does not, you know where we are.

The clock ticks the same for everyone

No route pauses limitation: writing to the airline, complaining to a regulator, or instructing a company does not stop the clock in most forums; issuing court proceedings does. Cuadrench Moré fixed the principle that national law sets these deadlines, and our engine encodes each forum conservatively, referring claims out near expiry rather than holding them. Whichever route you take, take it while the claim is comfortably alive.