Avios travellers hit by the Nats outage that disrupted more than 2,000 UK flights on Tuesday and Wednesday are unlikely to get compensation, the Civil Aviation Authority said. For passengers, that leaves the cost of cancellations and long delays tied to whether the disruption falls under extraordinary circumstances.
More than 2,000 flights to and from the UK were cancelled or delayed across Tuesday and Wednesday, with London Heathrow, London Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted among the most affected hubs. The regulator said the incident is likely to be treated as extraordinary circumstances under passenger rights rules, which changes the compensation position for delays or cancellations directly caused by the outage.
Jill Parkes and Zurich to Melbourne
Jill Parkes said her flight from Zurich to Melbourne via Heathrow and Kuala Lumpur was cancelled on Tuesday. She wrote that she and another woman in their seventies were told by Dnata staff to take their luggage and find accommodation at their own expense, with no assurance of new flights.
“We are two women in our seventies,” she said in an email shared about the disruption. “Very distressing for elderly people with no experience in booking online, or without access to surplus funds to cover these unexpected costs.”
58 Heathrow delays, 74 Gatwick
As of 8am Thursday, Flightradar24 showed 58 delayed flights at London Heathrow with an average delay of 14 minutes, 74 delayed flights at London Gatwick with an average delay of 13 minutes, and 45 delayed flights at London Stansted with an average delay of nine minutes. Those figures show the disruption was still working through the network a day after the technical issue first hit Nats’s flight data processing system.
Martin Rolfe was summoned at lunchtime on Wednesday to see Heidi Alexander after the problem was reported. The CAA said passengers are “unlikely to be entitled to compensation for delays or cancellations that were directly caused by the incident,” so the practical next step for affected travellers is to keep records of extra spending and hold on to their booking details while airlines process the fallout.
CHF600 and two nights
“So far it has cost more than CHF600 (£545),” Parkes said. “We have had to pay for two nights’ accommodation, plus taxis and food bought at Aldi.” She said the couple were offered new flights with Thai from Zurich via Bangkok at midnight on the first night, but “the flights are not until today, 10 September.”
The unresolved issue is how much compensation, if any, passengers will ultimately receive from airlines or other parties when the delay was driven by a system failure rather than a routine schedule problem.
