Travel insurance may not cover all costs if your Ryanair flight is cancelled

INSURANCE experts are warning that not all travel policies will cover your costs if you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of passengers affected by Ryanair’s cancellation of 40-50 flights a day until the end of October.

A survey of travel insurers has found that most standard policies will not cover “consequential losses” such as hotels and car hire as a result of flights being cancelled by an airline.

Insurance professional  Fiona Macrae, of the Travel Insurance Explained campaign, said unless a policy specified cover for cancelled flights, claims were unlikely to be successful.

“We would urge anyone buying a travel insurance policy to look for one that provides cancellation cover for ‘any cause beyond your control and you are unable to claim back from any other source’.

Ryanair claim that the cancellations, due to a ‘mess up’ over the holiday roster for its pilots, amount to less  than 2% of its over 2,500 daily flights. 

The low-cost airline is offering  €13,500 (£12,000)  tax-free bonuses  to its pilots to tempt them to give up days off and holiday and avoid further cancellations.

EU compensation rules for cancelled flights are:

• Passengers are entitled to assistance and compensation, if the disruption was within an airline’s control.
• Airlines have to offer full refunds, paid within seven days, or re-bookings for a flight cancelled at short notice.
• In addition, passengers can also claim compensation.
• Cancellation amounts are: €250 euros (£218) for short-haul, €440 euros (£384) for medium-haul and €600 euros (£523) for long-haul.
• Passengers who reach their destination more than three hours late can be compensated from €200 to €600, depending on the length of flights and delay.

Consumer organisations have called on Ryanair to automatically compensate affected passengers instead of them having to go through the airline’s claims process.

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