Good news for many passengers: the ECJ has ruled that if a flight is canceled due to a strike, compensation usually has to be paid. But there are a few exceptions.
Passengers can once again rely on the EU’s highest court – they are usually entitled to compensation even if their connection has been canceled due to a cabin crew strike.
There are only exceptions in limited individual cases, according to a judgment of the European Court of Justice published on Wednesday. The complaint was filed by a consumer who demanded 250 euros because his flight from Salzburg to Berlin was canceled due to a strike (Case C-613/20).
The EU has clearly regulated the rights of passengers and, above all, how much compensation they are entitled to in the event of deviations: In principle, travelers have the option of claiming up to 250 euros on short flights if their connection is canceled or significantly delayed and no appropriate alternative is offered will. This applies to flights of less than 1,500 kilometers; for longer journeys, the amount of compensation increases to up to 600 euros.
However, there are some exceptions, for example if passengers are informed at least two weeks in advance, or an “exceptional circumstance” is asserted – as Eurowings believes in this case. According to the relevant EU regulation, this is the case if the circumstances for the cancellation “could not have been avoided even if all reasonable measures had been taken”.
The airline Eurowings had claimed that the company had taken all these “reasonable measures” to limit the effects of the strike. The highest European court takes the view, however, that it is foreseeable that if a parent company calls for a strike, employees from other parts of the group will join the strike.
Like any employer, an airline whose employees go on strike for better working conditions “cannot claim that it has no influence whatsoever on these measures”. He “basically has the means to prepare for it and, if necessary, to intercept its consequences so that the events remain controllable for him to a certain extent.”
Eurowings announced that it “regretted that the European Court of Justice did not follow our view in its judgment today”. The reasons for the judgment will be analyzed in detail. The Bundesverband der Deutschen Luftverkehrswirtschaft (BDL) takes the view that the judgment does not make it clear that a strike cannot be an exceptional circumstance under any circumstances. The association demanded that the EU air passenger rights regulation should be changed so that strikes are considered exceptional circumstances.
Politicians from the Greens and the Left welcomed the court decision. However, the European parliamentarian Rasmus Andresen (Greens) criticized the fact that the dispute had to be resolved in court at all. “We see it again and again that airlines avoid implementing the law.” Left-wing politician Jörg Cezanne also sees the ruling strengthening the rights of workers, who could now give more weight to their demands in the event of a strike.
Similar to now, the ECJ had already ruled in March. At the time, it was said that an airline could not argue that a strike was an exceptional circumstance, especially if it complied with applicable law. If the industrial action was limited to enforcing, say, wage increases or better working hours, this would be “part of the normal conduct of the company’s business” (Case C-28/20).
The background at that time was a dispute from Scandinavia. In this case, too, a traveler wanted compensation of 250 euros because a flight from Malmö to Stockholm planned for April 2019 was canceled on the same day due to a pilots strike in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. According to the ECJ, more than 4,000 flights had been canceled because of the several days of work stoppage, which affected almost 400,000 guests.
Jane Stock is a technology author, who has written for 24 Hours World. She writes about the latest in technology news and trends, and is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve his audience’s experience.
