Don't fly with Air Berlin

AVOID AirBerlin

AirBerlin don't follow the EU regulations for compensation which means that if they cancel a flight You as a passenger have no guarantee to receive compensation for extra costs and other compensation that You are entitled to.

AirBerlin are lately convicted by the Swedish Consumer Protection Agency ("Allmänna reklamationsbyrån") - which is the enforcing body of the EU directive 261/04  in Sweden - in FOUR CASES. Information about these cases can be found at www.radron.se/svarta-listan/?yndustry=Resor (unfortunately in Swedish only) which is the agency's listing of companies that don't follow their rulings. Our case is described in short on the agency's site (but in Swedish) and a little more in detail below. What they write on their site is their findings and rulings, as verified by their lawyers. It is not our subjective view of things, but their proofed version of what has happened.

When a ruling is given by The Swedish Consumer Protection Agency, they have looked into a dispute between a consumer and a company and judged it from a judicial point of view. According to Swedish law if the agency rules that a company shall act in a specific way that is a recommendation for the company - they are not forced to follow the ruling. The reason for this is that the Swedish lawmakers assumed that all companies will follow agency's ruling in order to avoid badwill and hence bad business. History also shows that all serious companies do follow the agency's rulings. However AirBerlin does not follow the ruling of the agency!  OBVIOUSLY AIRBERLIN CANNOT BE CONSIDERED BEEING A SERIOUS COMPANY.

In other countries, i.e. Denmark, rulings from similar consumer protection bodies are binding and to not follow them is a criminal offence. Unfortunately that is not the case in Sweden. How is it in your country?

OUR STORY

Last winter me, my wife and our three children should fly from Stockholm  to Funchal/Madeira via Berlin - both legs of the trip with AirBerlin  I did check-in on AirBerlin's web-site at 22.00 in the evening before, printed out boarding cards, and everything seemed fine with our flight. 

When we did arrive at the Stockholm airport we were met with information that the flight was cancelled which meant that we would not be able to get to Berlin in time to catch the second flight. We were also told that it had been known since early in the evening before that the plane would not come to Stockholm in time for the 06:30 flight in Saturday morning! And they blamed bad weather in Berlin for the cancellation.

There was a way to fly us down to Funchal so that we would get there in the same day – via Copenhagen (with SAS) and then TAP via Lisbon. AirBerlin's handler at Arlanda airport told us that if we wanted Air Berlin to take the extra cost incurred we had to wait in a line to the service desk to be rebooked. If we instead booked those flights by ourselves Air Berlin would not take the cost.  After waiting in that line for FOUR HOURS and finally reaching the service desk, Air Berlin refused to book us on another airline company and said that we can fly with the next AirBerlin flight to Funchal, which would be THREE DAYS LATER  . We were told that if we want to fly with another airline company we had to pay for that by ourselves. Of course we could not delay our trip with THREE DAYS, so we did buy tickets with TAP leaving in the evening from Stockholm to Lisbon where we had to stay in a hotel overnight and then continue to Funchal in the next afternoon. We arrived to Funchal at 16:00 on Dec 19 instead of 13:00 on Dec 18 as intended - a delay of 27 hours.

Now for the interesting part - AirBerlin's LIES

We got the information at the Stockholm airport that the flight was cancelled due to bad weather in Berlin and that all flights to and from Berlin were cancelled. This was a COMPLETE LIE!

I did check via Internet, while waiting in the line at the airport, and when connected to the Berlin airports live flight information I could see that almost all other flights in morning was arriving and departing to/from Berlin in time. I have proofs of this as I saved screen shots of the internet sites of Berlin's airports.

So why did AirBerlin lie? Well, according to the EU regulation, if the reason for cancellation is bad weather the airline companies don't have to pay any compensation when cancelling flights . Of course this makes it tempting to blame any flight cancellations on the weather. Which AirBerlin did.

Consequences for us

We had to spend hours finding alternative flights and spending large sums of money to be able to get five people on flights the very same day. Try to imagine how hard this is on a Saturday, few days before Christmas. To this comes extra costs for two hotel rooms in Lisbon where we got stuck over night plus taxis, food etc. etc. And of course worse of all, missing the first 27 hours of our vacation (while still having to pay for the hotel and rental car in Funchal for that missed day) and all aggrevation and irritation. And all of this with three kids in our company.

Our rights according to EU regulations and also the ruling of the Swedish Consumer Protection Agency

According to Regulation (EC) No 261/2004 (Article 5 and 7) if an airline company cancels a flight they have to compensate all passengers with €250-600 each depending on travel distance. In our case it was €600 each - summing up to €3000 in total. This is not reimbursement of extra costs for the passengers, this is a fine for the airline company decided by the European Community. If we would have received that money most of it would go to cover the additional cost of late expensive airline ticket purchases plus hotel rooms and taxis etc.

AirBerlin's reaction - or rather lack thereof!

AirBerlin has not bothered to answer any requests from us and not even answered The Swedish Consumer Protection Agency when they have tried to communicate with AirBerlin. They have not followed the ruling of the agency and we have not received any compensation from them - not a single penny.

Public court?

The only way for us to get the compensation we are entitled to is to bring AirBerlin to public court, which we would do if it was not for the fact that AirBerlin has no official company presence in Sweden (all of their flights are sold over the net or net-based travel agencies) and then we have to drag them to court in Germany. This is of course not to consider as a private family. And that is of course also in AirBerlins calculations.