Passengers going on holidays from Romania lost around 2,500 hours of vacation last summer due to numerous flight delays, according to the latest report by AirHelp released at the end of June. AirHelp, the world leader providing legal services to airline passengers who have experienced a flight cancellation, delay or overbooking when traveling into or out of the European Union, has been available in Romania in September 2017.
The report also says that more than 1.2 million flights were delayed worldwide in 2018, during June 15-September 15, with almost 305,000 of them in Europe.
During the summer holiday last year, 636,000 passengers from Romania faced delayed flights, with almost 5,600 of them registering a delay higher than 15 minutes, while 100 were cancelled. On the flights eligible to compensations (delays higher than 3 hours), over 23,000 passengers were affected.
The same figure was also expected for 2019, considering that during the first three weeks of June this year over 1,180 flights out of 3,800 taking off from Romania saw delays higher than 15 minutes and cancellations.
The worst ranked on punctuality was Germany, with 48,000 flight hours delayed, followed by UK. Although Romania does register flight delays, our country is among the most punctual states, immediately after Finland.
The families going on holiday this summer will be probably most affected. The AirHelp report forecasts that over 592,000 passengers will have delays higher than 15 minutes and flight cancellations from June 15 to September 15, 2019.
Passengers are advised to be informed on their rights. The EU legislation (EU Directive 261) allows passengers of the airline companies to get compensations of up to EUR 600/person in the case of delays higher than 3 hours.
“Millions of passengers of airline companies faced delayed flights last year and a second summer of chaos is ahead of us if the airline industry takes no actions. A lot of people have lost hours of their vacation and this is unacceptable,” said Marta Koziarz, expert AirHelp.
The first six months of 2018 also registered a record number of flight delays from Romania, with 505 flights taking off three hours later than the initial departure time, which affected 50,000 passengers, according to previous AirHelp statistics.