Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast. You will be aware that I do try to bring you some intricacies from the really remarkable world of travel, and I'm going to try and do that right now in response to a question I got from a listener, and thank you for that.

It's all about delayed flight and your entitlement to compensation.

You will, I hope, be aware that under European air passenger rights rules,

which are adopted pretty much wholesale by the UK after Brexit, that if your

flight is disrupted, which means either cancelled or delayed by at least three hours, you are

entitled to hundreds of pounds in compensation unless the airline can demonstrate that extraordinary

circumstances were responsible.

The most remarkable aspect of the rules is that, well, some years ago,

European judges decided that if your flight was three hours late, that amounted to a cancellation,

so therefore you should have the cancellation compensation,

which is, for a shorter flight, 220 pounds, and even for a European flight of above

1,500 kilometres, that's roughly London to Budapest, you should be entitled to 350 pounds,

just for arriving three hours late. I agree, it is ridiculous and it bears no

resemblance to the amount you paid and it is clearly on or off. Your flight could be

three hours exactly late or it could be 23 hours late and you get exactly the same

amount of compensation. I don't make the rules. I just report them. And I've had an interesting

question from Mark who is intrigued to know how the three hours is calculated. What he means by

that is you've got the scheduled time of arrival.

Now for airlines that is the moment they expect the plane to taxi up to the stand and for the

parking brake to be applied. Sometimes they hit it very often they don't. They might be early.

They might be late. But that is the published arrival time

and generally they build in a bit of leeway into that not least because it reduces the number of claims

...