Duty of care: meals, hotels and transfers during disruption

Duty of care is the most under-claimed right in air passenger law, largely because people assume it disappears the moment an airline says the word weather. It does not. This guide sets out when care starts, exactly what the airline has to provide, why the obligation survives extraordinary circumstances, what happens once a delay passes five hours, and how to get your money back when the airline provided nothing at all.

Care is a separate right

Regulation 261/2004 contains three distinct entitlements. Article 7 is the fixed compensation. Article 8 is the choice between a refund and rerouting. Article 9 is the right to care, and it is the only one of the three that is owed in essentially every disruption of any length. Airlines answer complaints as though there were only one right, because the compensation is the expensive one, so a refusal letter about extraordinary circumstances often quietly ignores the care you were also owed. The full text is on EUR-Lex, and the version assimilated into UK law is on legislation.gov.uk.

When care starts, and what it covers

Article 6(1) sets the trigger by distance, and the thresholds are considerably lower than the three-hour arrival test that governs compensation.

The examples come from the CAA's guidance on delays, which uses the same bands. Two things follow. A two-hour delay on a short-haul flight already entitles you to food and drink, even though no compensation will ever be due for a delay that short. And on a cancellation or a denied boarding, care starts straight away rather than after any waiting period.

What the airline has to provide

• Meals and refreshments in a reasonable relation to the waiting time. Normally vouchers, sometimes a card at a specific outlet.
• Two communications at no cost, drafted in 2004 as telephone calls, telex or fax messages, and in practice now emails or messages.
• Hotel accommodation where a stay of one or more nights becomes necessary, or where a stay additional to that intended by the passenger becomes necessary.
• Transport between the airport and the accommodation, which means the airline pays for the taxi or transfer as well as the room.

Care is provided in kind, not in cash, and it is meant to be offered without you asking. Where you have reduced mobility, or you are travelling with a child under two, the airline must give particular attention to your needs and those of anyone accompanying you.

Care survives extraordinary circumstances

This is the part worth committing to memory. Article 5(3) removes the compensation where the disruption was caused by extraordinary circumstances, and it removes nothing else. The point was tested to destruction after the 2010 Icelandic volcanic eruption, when European airspace closed for days and one airline argued that a disruption on that scale should release it from the care obligation altogether. In Denise McDonagh v Ryanair, C-12/11, the Court of Justice rejected the argument, holding that the airline still had to provide care to passengers whose flights were cancelled by the airspace closure, and that EU law provides no temporal or monetary limitation on that duty.

So the correct reading of a storm is that you lose the fixed compensation and keep the meals, the hotel and the transfers. If a refusal letter cites the weather and then declines the hotel bill in the same paragraph, the second half of that letter is wrong. What does and does not count as extraordinary is set out in extraordinary circumstances explained.

Five hours: the right to walk away

Once a delay reaches five hours, Article 6 gives you an additional option. You can decide not to travel at all and take a refund of the ticket cost for the parts of the journey you have not made, within seven days. If you have already flown part of the itinerary and the journey no longer serves any purpose in relation to your original travel plan, you can also ask for a flight back to your first point of departure at the earliest opportunity. This is genuinely useful on a disrupted connection where continuing has become pointless, and it is separate from any compensation you may also be owed.

When the airline provides nothing

In a large-scale disruption the desk is often unstaffed and the app silent. The practical answer is to provide the care yourself and reclaim it, which airlines and ADR bodies both accept as normal. Four rules make that go smoothly.

1. Keep it proportionate. A mid-range airport hotel, a meal, a taxi. Not a suite and not a tasting menu. Reimbursement is for reasonable costs, and the airline will push back on anything that looks like an upgrade.
2. Ask first if there is anyone to ask. A note in the airline app saying you were told nothing was available strengthens the claim considerably.
3. Keep itemised receipts. Card statements alone are weak. Photograph paper receipts before they fade.
4. Claim care and compensation in one message. Two separate cases invite two separate delays.

A worked example

Two passengers on a 22:00 flight from Faro to Birmingham, about 1,900 km, are told at 21:30 that the flight is cancelled because of a storm at the destination. The airline is entitled to refuse compensation if the storm genuinely made the operation impossible and it took all reasonable measures. It is not entitled to refuse care.

They are rebooked for the following afternoon, so an overnight stay becomes necessary. They find nothing at the airport, book a hotel for £140, spend £22 on a taxi and £38 on dinner and breakfast, and keep the receipts. The claim is £200 in care costs, reimbursable in full on receipts, and nothing in compensation - and the airline is wrong if it declines the £200 on the same grounds it declined the compensation. Had the cause been a technical fault rather than the storm, the same £200 would be due plus £350 each in compensation under the 1,500 to 3,500 km band, which is the figure the compensation checker would return for that route.

Making the claim

Write once, itemise the costs against the receipts, state the flight and the length of the wait, and quote Article 9 by name. If the airline is also refusing compensation, deal with both in the same message using the structure in claiming it yourself, for free. Keep evidence of what you were told at the airport, as covered in proving your claim, and if the answer is still no after eight weeks, take it to an approved ADR body or the CAA. Care claims tend to do well at ADR precisely because the receipts make them concrete.