Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

Well, here's a story that I hope will be of some interest to you, and it's a bit controversial as well.

And it's all to do with flight compensation. I think I could recite in my sleep the rules that affect travellers when their flight goes wrong.

They are basically exactly the rules as devised by Brussels and been enforced about the last 15 years or so,

and they basically mean that if your flight arrives at its destination

and the door is opened three hours or more,

after your flight was due to arrive,

then you get compensation on a sliding scale from 220 pounds up to, well, 520 pounds.

That is in the case of a long haul flight that's more than four hours late arriving.

This applies to all flights on UK and European airlines and for all flights leaving the UK.

So it's a remarkably generous piece of compensation

if you happen to be in that category,

which I have been a few times,

of being a bit over three hours late,

which is annoying,

but then you're given hundreds of pounds to compensate.

Now, the government in the UK is proposing to reduce the amount of compensation that is paid

for domestic flights. And the idea is that they will align the compensation idea with what

effectively happens on the trains, which is your flights an hour late. You get maybe half the cost

of your fare back. Two hours late, you get the whole thing back. Now, for flying, your flights an hour late, you get a quarter of your fare back, your flights two hours late you get the whole thing back now for flying your flights an hour late there you get a

quarter of your fare back your flights two hours late that would be half of it three hours late

you're going to get the whole lot back now because the vast majority of domestic fares are a lot

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