Very short Cathay Pacific Transit at Hong Kong airport

[elanshin]

Exactly,
The passenger either accepts the airline's reason or make a complaint to the NEB themselves or via a third party facilitator.

The NEB decides if any laws are broken. If they are then fines and penalties may be levied if there are systemic violations. However the NEB cannot legally force the airline to pay compensation to the individual - any opinion about an individual passenger compensation is non binding.



.

No but if they deemed an airline was in breech, you could take that ruling yourself to claims court and likely have a ruling in your favour.

 

[Quickstatus]

you could take that ruling yourself to claims court and likely have a ruling in your favour.

Good luck with that when the small claims court is in say madrid and you are in Dubbo.

 

[MEL_Traveller]

Good luck with that when the small claims court is in say madrid and you are in Dubbo.

That’s true.

And that’s why these claim firms are so useful. Yes, you lose 33-35%, but there’s no fuss, no filing issues, no waiting around. And no burden of proof on the passenger. They handle everything.

And because they have such a huge incentive - €200 per passenger for long haul - if they can possibly get the money they will.

There is a word of caution however as we saw with a fellow AFFer that used one of these claim firms to go after Finnair. The claim couldn’t be resolved at first instance and court action was instigated.

The claim firm went bust, and because the court action was actually in the AFFer’s name, finnair sought costs directly from them.

I’m not sure we ever found out what happened in that case (did the AFFer end up paying?)

Perhaps the takeout from that is if the claim firm wants to take your case to court - perhaps as a test case as it was above - time to reassess.