Can I Cancel Ryanair Flights & Get a Refund in 2025?

You can cancel any Ryanair flight and often you are even entitled to a refund of taxes and fees included in the ticket price – averaging €30 per traveller. This was confirmed by numerous European courts already, among them the German Federal Court of Justice (see ruling of 1 August 2023, case reference X ZR 118/22).

In this article, we’ll show you how to cancel with Ryanair and obtain a partial ticket refund. Step by step, we’ll answer each of the following questions:

In the course of the following sections, we’ll explain how you can receive a ticket refund of typically around €30 per flight and passenger even when cancelling budget flights in Value or Regular fare classes – without cancellation fees being deducted and without a travel cancellation insurance.

Besides, we have summarised the best approach to cancelling your Ryanair flight and claiming a partial refund of your booking price in a practical quick guide.

But first, let’s address the most important questions about cancelling Ryanair flights:

Guide to cancelling a Ryanair flight

We’ve compiled the most important recommendations for cancelling Ryanair flights in this guide. With the following three steps, you can quickly and securely cancel your ticket and obtain a partial refund of your booking price:

1. Cancellation of the flight

To cancel, it’s enough to simply not show up for your Ryanair flight. Notifying the airline is not required. According to Ryanair’s website, customers don’t need to inform them about cancellation before departure. The reason is that despite the statutory entitlement, Ryanair states that it usually doesn’t pay any refund of the booking price voluntarily anyway, so they don’t need timely information for this purpose.

2. Calculation of the refundable portion of the ticket price

Contrary to Ryanair’s claims, travellers who cancel their flights often have a statutory right to a refund of taxes and fees included in the ticket price. These typically amount to €30-40 per person for each flight route from Germany, for example. Ryanair only owes such taxes and fees to tax authorities and airports for passengers who actually fly. When a customer cancels their flight, the airline saves these amounts and must therefore refund them under multiple European jurisdictions like the German and Austrian ones.

3. Enforcement of your refund claim

Voluntarily, Ryanair only offers to refund government taxes from the departure country of a cancelled flight upon request. At the same time, the airline stipulates in its terms and conditions that the remaining ticket price including all other levies and fees non-refundable. Moreover, the airline charges an administrative fee of €20 per passenger and flight for the refund process. As the refundable amount is usually lower than the administrative fee, Ryanair typically refuses to pay any refund at all.

This means Ryanair falls short of legal requirements, at least for trips from and to numerous European countries like Germany and Austria. To enforce these statutory rights, i.e., for the refund of the booking price amounting to all unused taxes and fees, you can request this from Ryanair on your own using our free letter template. However, be aware that in our experience, Ryanair rarely complies with out-of-court assertions of refund claims.

Our passenger rights website provides a safe alternative that allows air travellers to quickly and easily obtain the refund they’re entitled to. Refund Pilot offers direct payments on ticket prices up to the amount of taxes and fees saved upon cancellation, minus a moderate service fee of 17-20% (including VAT). To apply for our direct refund of 80-83% of your statutorily enshrined right to a repayment, you can use our compensation calculator without obligation. It only takes a few minutes.

The subsequent sections of this article provide more detailed information on the 3 individual steps for cancelling Ryanair flights and obtaining a refund.

I. Do I need to notify Ryanair about my flight cancellation and, if so, how?

In this section, we explain in order:

1. whether and how you need to notify Ryanair of your flight cancellation (more on this under 1.);

2. which cancellation conditions apply (more on this under 2.);

3. when and how you can alternatively rebook with Ryanair (more on this under 3.);

4. which best practices we recommend for the highest possible refunds (more on this under 4.).

1. Ways to cancel Ryanair flights

How should you notify Ryanair when you want to cancel a flight? This depends on whether you want to recover part of the price for the unused flight tickets. There are therefore two ways to cancel:

A. A very simple one, but where you don’t get any money back.

B. And a second, less well-known one, where usually just 5 to 10 minutes are enough to get back an average of €75 per cancelled booking.

We’ll explain both in turn. Afterwards, under C., we’ll address cancellation in special cases, such as partial cancellation for one of several travellers or when booking through third-party online travel agencies like Opodo.

A. The passive way without a ticket refund

If you simply don’t want to take the flight without having to pay penalty fees, just don’t show up at the airport.

Ryanair doesn’t provide any special contact channels to inform the company about ticket cancellations, anyways. Conversely, according to their terms and conditions and the information on the airline’s website, there’s no obligation to do so if you simply don’t want to take a flight.

A Ryanair customer doesn’t need to explicitly cancel their trip if they want to forego a flight price refund and only want to avoid penalty fees. In this case, you don’t need to notify Ryanair online, by email, or by phone that you won’t be flying. Written notifications to the airline or calls about this are not even expected.

To cancel, it’s enough to simply not show up for a Ryanair flight. So don’t check in at all and don’t appear at the gate at flight time. If you’ve already checked in early and your plans change, it’s enough if you don’t board the flight and don’t fly. With this, you’ve already sufficiently informed Ryanair about your cancellation.

By the way: Even if you don’t travel, you preserve your statutory right to a partial ticket refund under many European jurisdictions. You’re entitled to this in any booking class simply by not taking the flight. The next section explains in more detail why and how much of a partial refund of the flight price you’re statutorily entitled to.

Just because you don’t formally cancel, you don’t lose this passenger right. You can therefore also claim it later. In Germany, for example, even up to the expiry of the limitation period three years after the flight date. However, you must also take action yourself in this case. Just because you don’t take a flight, Ryanair doesn’t automatically refund parts of the flight price. Therefore, we recommend:

B. Active cancellation with a flight price refund

Ryanair doesn’t charge additional costs if you don’t show up for their flights, but they also keep the entire flight price. So if you want to exercise your statutory right to a flight price refund, you must actively request the ticket refund. This is possible until the entitlement becomes barred by the applicable statute of limitations.

For example, you may still assert refund claims regarding flights to and from Germany at the latest three years after the flight (Section 195 German Civil Code) and at the earliest with the cancellation of your Ryanair tickets. If you don’t explicitly cancel, according to German Federal Court of Justice case law, not showing up for the flight counts as de facto cancellation (Ruling of 1.8.2023, Case reference X ZR 118/22).

If you know before the travel date that you won’t be flying, the question arises whether you should

cancel your flight in advance (1) or

wait and simply not check in (2).

With the first option, you can claim money back earlier; with the second, you can claim it later but have the chance for more. Let’s look at both options in turn:

(1) Cancel in advance and request ticket refund directly

One option is to explicitly cancel your flights ahead of the departure date and combine this with a request for a refund. For this, you can use our free claim letter template, fill it out and send it to Ryanair by email. The advantage: Your refund claim already arises at the time of cancellation and not as late as on the day of the flight.

Before you assert your claim, however, it is important to determine exactly how much of the flight price you can claim in your case.

The exact amount depends on the applicable national jurisdiction. This, in turn, is determined by the flight route and the country of the passenger’s residence, since the universal framework of the EU’s Air Passenger Rights Regulation does not cover the rights in cases in which travellers themselves decide to cancel their flights. What provisions apply instead and when will be a topic for us to discuss in detail in the next section.

Generally speaking, however, at least for cancellation before the flight date, the refundable amount is not the full flight price, but always only a part of it. The statutory refund claim in such cases is commonly based on the amount of taxes and fees that the airline saves when you don’t fly. These typically amount to €30-40 per route and passenger. More details on the calculation basics can be found in section II.

Unfortunately, Ryanair doesn’t post the refundable amount in the ticket invoice. However, you can still find it out in a few minutes: We have a database where you can check for free how high the respective refund claim is for a cancellation of any Ryanair flight.

Using the calculator is non-binding; using Refund Pilot’s direct refund service is no prerequsite. You may as well assert your refund claim on your own afterwards. At the same time, if you want avoid dealing with the airline yourself, you may, of course, apply for a direct payment of 80% of itthe refundable amount with just a few more clicks after calculating it through our online form.

We compare the advantages and disadvantages of these different approaches in section III below.

(2) Wait, don’t fly, and only then claim ticket refund or more

Alternatively, you can wait until the travel date and simply not fly. In this case, you may only claim the ticket refund after the travel date, because in this case not showing up for the flight constitutes the (de facto) cancellation and the claim to a refund does only arise thereafter. However, with this option, there’s a chance of a higher payment because your flight might be significantly delayed or cancelled. If you haven’t cancelled in advance, you may then be entitled to a full flight price refund and not just a partial one (more on this here).

Secondly, you may even be able to claim flight compensation from Ryanair (more on the requirements under the link). Because if you haven’t cancelled in advance, in the case of a flight cancellation, for example, the airline is ultimately responsible for you not taking the trip.

And even if your flight does take place on time, you can still claim at least the partial refund of taxes and fees from Ryanair by simply not showing up, just as if you had cancelled in advance.

C. Special Cases

If only individual passengers of a booking for multiple people don’t want to travel, this doesn’t affect the transportation of the others. Those who can’t fly stay at home, and those who want to travel check in normally and arrive at the gate on time. Such cases don’t pose a problem for Ryanair.

No separate notifications are necessary. Only when informing Ryanair about the partial cancellation while requesting a flight price refund should you specify which passengers it applies to and which not. Also, you obviously can’t claim a refund for the ticket price of those who do fly, only for those who don’t travel.

Return flights included in a booking remain unaffected by the cancellation of an outbound flight with Ryanair. They can be taken normally without you having to separately notify the airline if you don’t take the outbound flight. Instead, you just need to check in separately for the return flight and arrive at the departure gate on time. Otherwise, no additional precautions are necessary if you don’t participate in another flight of the same booking beforehand.

Additional special considerations may apply if you booked your ticket through a third party (e.g., a travel agency or booking engine). In this case, this booking office is also the right contact for cancellation. If you don’t notify the third party about the cancellation, costs or problems with the return flight may arise. The method of cancellation depends on the provider through which the booking was made.

Information on cancellation rules is regularly provided on the respective booking website’s homepage. In most cases, a cancellation can be made online with just a few clicks. Often, the corresponding link can also be found in the original email with the booking confirmation.

However, with major online travel agencies such as booking.com and Opodo, to our knowledge, no penalty fees are incurred if customers don’t report that they won’t be taking a Ryanair flight booked through them. In such cases, Ryanair’s guidelines apply, and consequently, for a cancellation it’s sufficient not to check in and not to appear for boarding.

2. What conditions does Ryanair set out for cancellations?

Apart from the rules regarding ticket refunds, Ryanair’s cancellation conditions are quite straightforward. For cancelling a flight, you don’t need to observe any specific deadline or form. You also don’t need to pay any cancellation fees if you don’t take the flight.

At the same time, Ryanair is not willing to refund the flight price you already paid. If it were (only) up to Ryanair’s General Terms and Conditions, cancellation with the airline simply means: 1. not flying, 2. not having to notify them, 3. not having to pay any additional fees, 4. but also not getting anything back.

However, in doing so, Ryanair disregards statutory refund entitlements of cancelling air travellers granted by multiple European jurisdictions. As far as these apply, the airline must nevertheless refund a certain part of the ticket price in every cancellation case. Often, this is over €30 per flight route and person. This also applies in principle to inexpensive tickets in the „Value“ and „Regular“ fare classes.

The exact refundable amount depends on the specific flight connection booked. In a separate section below, we therefore address in more detail the question of exactly how much of the booking price you can reclaim for cancelled Ryanair flights.

To claim your ticket refund, you need to separately request it from Ryanair – for example, by email. We provide a free claim letter template for this purpose.

Alternatively, you can also take advantage of Refund Pilot’s service. After accepting your application through our online form, you’ll immediately receive a direct payment of 80-83% of the flight price refund you’re entitled to. In return, we’ll handle the dispute with the airline without any effort or cost risk for you.

You can find more information on claiming the ticket refund in the linked section of the article further below.

3. Rebooking as an alternative?

In this section, we discuss the possibilities and costs of rebooking with Ryanair as an alternative to cancellation. We explain in order:
a. when and how you can rebook Ryanair flights (requirements for rebooking),
b. what fees rebooking a Ryanair flight costs &
c. to what extent special rules apply in exceptional cases.

a. Requirements for rebooking

If a traveller just wants to postpone their flight and plans to take it in the near future, rebooking presents itself as a possible alternative to not taking the flight and subsequently getting a partial refund. Up to 2.5 hours before departure, the flight date, flight time and flight route of any Ryanair flight can be changed – provided the passenger hasn’t checked in yet. Even a traveller’s name can be adjusted for a (substantial) fee.

At the same time, Section 13.2 of Ryanair’s terms and conditions prohibits rebooking to another Ryanair flight that departs from or arrives at an airport outside the countries where the originally booked flight was supposed to depart from or arrive at. This means: You can rebook a flight from London Stansted to Palma de Mallorca to a flight from Manchester to Barcelona.

Even rebooking to a reverse connection from Spain to the United Kingdom would be conceivable. However, changing to a destination outside of Spain would not be permissible, for example to a flight from London Stansted to Dublin or Rome.

The booking can be changed most easily prior to the trip in one of the following three ways:

1. Through your MyRyanair account online. Changes can be made online in the MyRyanair user account. This can be accessed via the „Login“ menu item on the Ryanair website. If you’ve set up the MyRyanair app on your smartphone and linked it to your MyRyanair account, you may also access your bookings directly there. To do this, the user selects the respective booking under „My Trips“ to manage it via the corresponding buttons.

2. Online without logging into the customer account. To do this, simply go to the „My bookings“ menu item on the Ryanair website, click on the „Reservation Number“ button and then enter your booking number and the email address you provided during booking. The reservation number is a six-digit code that is individually assigned to each booking.

For example, it might be „BAF6GB“ and should not be confused with the flight number, which consists of the airline Ryanair’s IATA code („FR“) and a two to four-digit number. You can find your reservation number in your booking confirmation, which you receive by email right after the booking process. It is explicitly labelled as such.

After you’ve accessed your booking, it’s possible to make changes under the corresponding button in the user interface.

b. What does rebooking cost with Ryanair?

For changes shortly after booking, the following special rule from Section 13.5 of Ryanair’s terms and conditions initially applies: Within the first 24 hours after booking, certain changes can be made free of charge in this way. On the one hand, the flight time can be adjusted, and on the other hand, the flight direction. So departure and destination airports can be swapped within a day after the booking. The same applies to minor changes in the spelling of a passenger’s name.

However, choosing a different travel destination is not free of charge even shortly after completing the booking. Ryanair also doesn’t allow a change of registered passengers or a complete cancellation of the trip under favourable conditions even during the first 24 hours after booking.

After the first 24 hours following booking, Ryanair then only permits any change to the flight data for a fee. Per passenger and flight route, the cost of an online rebooking with Ryanair is €45. For rebooking by phone or at the airport ticket counter, the fee is even €60 per passenger and route.

Additionally, you must pay the price difference, i.e., the amount by which the new flight is more expensive than the originally booked one. Especially if you want to reschedule your flight at short notice, you can expect significant surcharges due to dynamic pricing and the dwindling time gap between booking time and flight day. If you want to sell your flight ticket to someone else instead, it costs even €115 per route and passenger to change passenger names.

As a result, rebooking with Ryanair is often at least as expensive as completely booking a new flight. This applies in particular because when cancelling the original flight, you often retain your entitlement to a ticket refund amounting to taxes and fees only incurred by Ryanair for each passenger actually carried, whereas with a rebooking you don’t. The latter is because even if you change your booking and then use the flight tickets, by definition no taxes and fees are saved by Ryanair because you do in fact take part in the flight.

It’s therefore worth checking, in case of a change of plans, whether you can change the booking more cheaply by booking new flights at the desired time, cancelling the original booking, and then reclaiming the refundable part of the original fare.

Depending on the booking class chosen, there is a minor exception to this: If you book a flight in the „Flexi Plus“ fare, you won’t incur any fees when rebooking to another flight connection (Section 5.4 of Ryanair’s terms and conditions).

Otherwise, however, the usual rebooking costs apply here as well. This means that if the new flight connection costs more than the original one, a traveller must also pay the difference in the Flexi Plus fare. Moreover, booking changes are only possible to a limited extent if a passenger has already checked in or used the outbound flight of a ticket. In this case, a change is only possible via the call centre or the ticket counters at the airport.

c. COVID-19-related special rule for booking changes

Besides these, deviations from the general rules for rebooking are only conceivable in exceptional cases as part of special promotions. We’re only aware of one example of this. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ryanair made it possible for bookings up to 31.01.2022 to be rebooked free of charge to another flight before 30.09.2022. However, this previous special promotion has long expired by now. Ryanair has since removed the special terms and conditions „No change fee“ from its website.

Currently, no comparable special conditions apply at Ryanair anymore (as of August 1, 2025). Even those who fall ill with COVID-19 or otherwise at short notice and therefore have to cancel their flight only earn the regular statutory entitlement to a refund of taxes and fees (more on this in the next section).

Those affected are not entitled to any additional rights for discounted rebooking or refund because of their illness. More favourable rights do not arise even if the respective traveller is not allowed to take the flight due to legal quarantine obligations, although they might want to.

For all booking changes, the following applies: If the new flight is more expensive, the passenger must pay the difference to the previous booking price. It should be noted that this surcharge comes in addition to the rebooking fees. If you rebook to a cheaper flight, on the other hand, Ryanair offers no credit for the excess amount paid. In particular, even the rebooking fees to be paid do not decrease because the flight connection selected during rebooking is cheaper than the originally booked one.

4. Recommended approach

In this section, we show you the best sequence of steps to efficiently exercise your rights when cancelling your Ryanair flight and to obtain the highest possible refund. Here’s how to proceed:

a. Compare your alternatives: Rebooking or cancelling? And if so, how? (more on this under a.).

b. Cancel your Ryanair booking as simply as possible (more on this under b.).

c. Secure your ticket refund (more on this under c.).

a. Weighing the alternatives

First, you should clarify for yourself whether you’d prefer to cancel and request a partial refund or whether you’d like to take the flight at a later date. If the latter is the case, you should check how expensive a rebooking would be. You can find more information on this in the linked section. In case rebooking makes sense, further steps become unnecessary because you won’t need to cancel.

If, on the other hand, rebooking is not desired in your case or would be more expensive than cancelling, getting a partial refund and making a new booking, the only question is how to cancel most effectively.

Should you want to receive at least the refund of taxes and fees from your ticket price as quickly as possible, we advise you to cancel early. We explain how this works most effectively in the next step.

However, if you’re not in a hurry, we recommend not notifying Ryanair of the cancellation in advance, but instead simply not checking in and not flying. This has two advantages:

First, it’s more convenient because you don’t need to write an additional email to Ryanair in advance. Not showing up for the flight counts as an equivalent de facto cancellation under German law (see ruling of the German Federal Court of Justice from 1.8.2023, X ZR 118/22) and several other European jurisdictions.

Second, this keeps the chance of a significantly higher refund open until the last minute. This is because it could happen that Ryanair’s flight is significantly delayed or cancelled. If you still have an uncancelled booking in such a scenario, you’ll become entitled to a refund of the full ticket price under Article 8 of the Air Passenger Rights Regulation (more on this under the link).

And what’s more: If Ryanair is responsible for the flight cancellation, for example due to a malfunction of the aircraft, you can even claim additional compensation of €250-600. We explain the requirements for this here. At the same time, you remain entitled to a partial ticket refund even in cases where Ryanair simply operates your flight on time without you. So with regard to this statutory refund claim, you have nothing to lose and a lot to gain if you simply wait and don’t fly.

b. Cancelling a Ryanair booking

Depending on which approach you choose after the consideration discussed above, you should either cancel in advance or simply not check in.

If the first solution makes sense for you because you prefer to receive a partial ticket refund as quickly as possible and don’t want to wait until the travel date, you can declare your cancellation by email to Ryanair’s address, for example. A short informal text is sufficient, which could read as follows:

„Dear Sir or Madam,

I hereby cancel my booking with the booking reference … for Ryanair flight FR… on …. My cancellation concerns the transportation of myself and the other passengers … on the aforementioned flight connection.

Yours sincerely,

[Name]“

c. Claiming a ticket refund

Either way, you shouldn’t miss out on the ticket refund if you don’t take your flight. Unfortunately, Ryanair doesn’t make it very easy for customers to recover parts of the flight price. For instance, when you use the official online form to apply for a refund, Ryanair charges a processing fee of €20 per passenger and flight that usually exceeds the amount it is even willing to repay (more on this here).

Ryanair also advises against calling in regarding changes or cancellations of existing bookings. Ryanair’s hotline is not intended for rebooking or cancelling a flight. Instead, it is only available for the needs of people requiring assistance who wish to travel with Ryanair. Each call to the telephone number listed on Ryanair’s contact page also costs €0.20 from a landline and €0.60 from a mobile network. Even flat-rate phone plans may not cover the call costs.

However, it is straightforward to send an email for cancellation and request for refund to the general address of Ryanair’s customer service. Ryanair itself mentions it in the contact section of the company website.

We provide you with a suitable template for such a letter free of charge if you use our claim letter generator below. Simply enter your flight data and receive a free draft tailored to your case. Alternatively, you may also request the empty letter template under the link and then manually fill in your data.

Unfortunately, in our experience, Ryanair typically only provides refunds for unused tickets following legal proceedings. Hence, if you wish to save yourself the effort of trying to enforce your rights against Ryanair, you may want to determine the amount of refundable taxes and fees with just a few clicks using our refund calculator and apply for an immediate payment of 80% of this sum from us. You can find a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of these different approaches in section III below:

II. Extent of ticket price refund with Ryanair

If a Ryanair flight takes place and only an individual passenger doesn’t show up, the company generally doesn’t provide any refunds voluntarily. A traveller typically receives nothing back from Ryanair for cancelled tickets unless he sues. The airline points to its tight price calculation to the customer’s advantage as a justification. Only the government taxes of the departure country included in the flight price are refunded by Ryanair on its own initiative under certain conditions with deductions (more on this under 1.).

Even outside such special cases, however, passengers enjoy a statutory minimum entitlement to a refund of all taxes and fees included in the ticket price when cancelling under many European jurisdictions (more on this under 2.).

Moreover, in some exceptional cases Ryanair even repays the full ticket price, but only under certain circumstances such as illness or death of the traveller (more on this under 3.) and during worldwide travel restrictions such as during the COVID-19 pandemic (more under 4.).

1. Regular voluntary refund from Ryanair

If you don’t take a flight and don’t appear at the gate, according to Ryanair’s terms and conditions, you’re still entitled to a refund of the air passenger duty included in the flight price. These additional flight costs vary in their amount depending on the departure country of the connection. For instance, for most Ryanair flights the UK government levies an Air Passenger Duty of 13 GBP per person departing an airport in Great Britain.

Spain, on the other hand, does not impose any tax on passengers departing from the country. For all flights departing from Germany within the EU, for example, the tax currently amounts to €15.53 per person and flight under Section 11 of the German Air Traffic Tax Act (as of August 1, 2025). Until April 30, 2024, the tax still stood at €12.73 per person.

Even higher tax rates apply for longer flight routes. At Ryanair, this mainly affects flights to Israel and Egypt. For these, the air transport levy included in the ticket price has been €32.25 per passenger since 1.1.2023 and €39.34 since 01.05.2024.

The application required for a refund can be submitted online via Ryanair’s homepage. However, the relevant subpage is difficult to find. We therefore link to the application form here. After providing details about the flight, circumstances and contact details of the applicant, the application is processed by the airline.

But beware: For processing a formal application for a refund of the government air transport tax, Ryanair charges an administrative fee of €20 per person and flight. At least that’s what Article 4.2.1 of the terms and conditions provides (more on the validity of this clause below). If the amount of the expected refund is (as almost always) below this fee, the airline voluntarily does not pay out any refunds. Nearly all Ryanair flights from the UK, France, Ireland, Austria, France and Germany to other European countries, for example, fall into this category.

However, that’s not all:

Other passenger-related additional flight costs saved by the airline in the event of cancellation, such as airport fees and fuel surcharges, are not refunded by Ryanair at all, as they were allegedly not previously passed on to the flight price.

Conclusion: Ryanair almost never refunds anything for flight cancellations voluntarily and, if exceptionally they do, then significantly less than the sum of all taxes and fees (which passengers are statutorily entitled to; more on this immediately under 2.).

2. Statutory refund entitlements of passengers in case of cancellation

Whether you are eligible to reclaim taxes and fees after cancelling your flight is determined by national consumer law, as passenger-initiated cancellations fall outside the scope of the EU Air Passenger Rights Regulation (No. 261/2004). Which country’s legislation applies is based on where you reside and on your flight’s itinerary. If you just want to see what national law is applicable in your case and whether it affords you a statutory right to a refund, we suggest you use our free refund calculator. It’s the easiest way to get an assessment for your case directly:

If you want to understand the underlying legal mechanism, please read on:

Determining the applicable national law

Which jursdiction applies to international flights, is determined through international private law. More specifically, Article 6 of the Rome I Regulation provides that the national law of a passenger’s home country is applicable as far as a flight departs from or arrives at one of its airports. If a passenger travels on a route utterly outside his home country, the national law of the country in which the airline is headquartered applies instead. In Ryanair’s case, this will be the law of the Republic of Ireland.

On a practical level, what is considered your home country is determined by what you enter as your address as part of the personal data in your MyRyanair profile or during your individual booking. From our experience, this is at least what Ryanair regards as your country of residence.

So if you have entered a German address, for example, Ryanair will treat you as a resident of Germany in terms of the applicable national law. If, on the other hand, you have booked through an online travel agency that relies on screen scraping to place your booking with Ryanair and communicates some random address outside Europe to the airline (to exploit dynamic pricing), this will in practice typically prompt Ryanair to assume you actually live there.

Legal situation in different European jurisdictions

Once you have determined which national law applies based on the aforementioned rules, you will want to know whether it contains any provision on a passenger’s entitlement to a refund if they cancel a flight themselves. Various European jurisdictions including Germany and Austria have confirmed such refund rights exist, but the legal basis differs between countries. To provide you with an overview, please have a look at the following table that outlines the relevant legal situation in multiple European jurisdictions:

As you can see, many European countries have codified a statutory entitlement to a refund of taxes and fees for unused tickets. There is even a legal basis in the national law of Ireland, even though no precedent against Ryanair on its legal home turf exists yet. Moreover, due to the EU’s Unfair Contract Terms Directive (93/13/EEC) most EU countries as well as the United Kingdom have passed laws prohibiting the unfair restriction of those statutory consumer rights through a company’s terms and conditions.

At the same time, apart from a few exceptional cases, Ryanair offers cancelling travellers at most a refund of air passenger duties imposed by countries for every departing person. And even the payment of this small amount often does not occur because Ryanair’s processing fees are usually higher than the portion of the flight price that the airline would voluntarily be willing to refund. But must the passenger really be satisfied with this? Or can they possibly assert additional claims?

To determine any further claims of a Ryanair customer in the event of cancellation, it’s first important to know where such claims might arise from.

Moving forward, we will cover the details focussing on German law as it affects travel to and from the largest European country. As you can tell from the table presented above, however, several European countries provide a similar legal basis for refund claims. Broadly speaking, the legal situation among them seems comparable so that you may draw inferences from our discussion of German law to what applies if your flight falls under another European jurisdiction.

a. Basics: What must be refunded by law?

Especially in the budget flight segment, the booking price consists to a high percentage of amounts that the airline only has to pay as taxes and fees per passenger in case of actual transportation. Contrary to how Ryanair presents it, this means more than just the air passenger duty that the airline voluntarily refunds for a fee. It concerns all additional flight costs that are incurred by an airline only for people actually participating in a flight.

These include, for example, fees for security checks or airport fees. The sum of such taxes and fees usually amounts to over €30 per passenger even on intra-European flights departing from Germany. It consists of the following individual components:

The airline only has to forward the corresponding part of the ticket price to authorities and airports if a passenger actually flies: The departure countries usually only levy taxes in this case. Germany, for example, levies an air transport duty of €15.53 per person for flights within the EU since 1.5.2024 and €39.34 for more distant destinations such as Egypt. In addition, there are the costs for the security check (in Germany, the aviation security fee typically amounts to €10-15 per person checked, depending on the departure airport).

Furthermore, airports charge airlines fees for passenger handling. In Germany, depending on the departure airport, approximately €10-20 are charged – in Düsseldorf, for example, over €15, in Frankfurt €22, and in Munich even €23 (as of August 1, 2025). However, airlines like Ryanair only have to pay these amounts for travellers who actually take a flight. Otherwise, the airport has less work to do, charges fewer fees, and provides airlines with corresponding savings.

A traveller pays all these amounts automatically as part of their booking price – regardless of whether they ultimately fly and the taxes and fees are actually to be paid by Ryanair.

If a traveller does not use a booked ticket, the airline therefore saves the money for the aforementioned additional flight costs. To avoid being unjustly enriched, the airline is therefore obliged to refund the respective amount to the cancelling customer according to Sections 648, 812 of the German Civil Code. Or rather one of the similar statutes applicable in other European jurisdictions as mentioned above.

This is based on the legislative decision that the airline must not be financially better off when a flight booking is cancelled by the passenger than if it had transported a traveller as planned on the booked flight connection. By the way: For the same reason, the said statutory refund claim applies similarly to cancelled train tickets like those issued by Deutsche Bahn.

The taxes and fees listed above are saved even if a passenger simply doesn’t show up for their flight without cancelling. Because even then, the said taxes and fees are by definition not charged to an airline.

b. Non-refundable components of the flight price

However, the statutory refund claim does not cover the entire flight price.

In particular, the price for various additional services provided by the airline that do not cause any significant additional expense when carrying out the transportation is not to be refunded. Because Ryanair doesn’t save anything here if a traveller doesn’t take the flight. This category includes fees for priority boarding, baggage allowance and seat reservations. The amount of such items far exceeds the associated expense that Ryanair saves in case of a cancellation.

The effort, for example, to reserve a seat electronically in the system instead of simply automatically assigning it to a passenger before boarding is ultimately negligible for the airline. Instead, Ryanair measures the fees for additional services significantly higher mainly because the company can thereby calculate the base flight price for pure passenger transportation smaller for marketing purposes and make its tickets appear particularly cheap.

The same applies to fees charged for services that are already provided before the actual journey. These include commissions from online travel agencies as well as processing fees from Ryanair for merely confirming the booking. Such fees are not saved in case of cancellation because the consideration remunerated thereby has already taken place in the course of the booking (by bringing it about).

c. Calculation of a statutory refund claim in a specific case

Travellers can find the exact amount of their refund claim in the booking confirmation or the invoice for the respective flight with most airlines. EU Regulation No. 1008/2008 stipulates in Article 23 that, in addition to the total price of a flight, the individual items of taxes and fees must be disclosed.

At least for direct bookings, this information is often missing in the booking confirmation with Ryanair – unlike with Lufthansa or Eurowings. As the following example shows, Ryanair’s travel documents regularly only state the total price of a booking without breaking it down further:

If the travel documents don’t provide any information about taxes and fees in the ticket price of a cancelled flight, you can still calculate the amount by yourself. The general list in our linked article explains the amount of various taxes and fees that may apply per flight.

Alternatively, you can have the refundable amount automatically determined for a specific flight by using our free online calculator. Based on the travel data in the form, our web app automatically determines, without obligation, the taxes and fees included in the ticket price for which there is an entitlement to a refund. The result of the check is displayed directly online. A prior registration or the input of personal or contact data is not required.

d. Ryanair’s attempts to limit refund claims

Ryanair tries to undermine said statutory refund claims with various terms and conditions.

Nevertheless, numerous European courts have already determined that Ryanair’s contractual limitations on the refund of taxes and fees in case of cancellation in the company’s terms and conditions are void (see, for example, German Federal Court of Justice, Ruling of 01.08.2023, case reference X ZR 118/22; Higher Regional Court of Cologne, Decision of 29.01.2021, case reference 9 U 184/20; Regional Court of Cologne, Ruling of 17.07.2020, case reference 25 O 212/19; District Court of Erding, Ruling of 24.06.2020, case reference 9 C 6697/19).

Most judges also consider Ryanair’s prohibitively high processing fees of €20 per person and flight to be unlawful. Especially in conjunction with the refusal to refund more than the air passenger duties, they regularly result in unfair terms and conditions effectively excluding a refund.

In contrast, many European courts confirm that customers are nevertheless entitled to the statutory minimum claim for a refund of unused taxes and fees. Airlines like Ryanair nevertheless seem to expect that passengers, unaware of their rights, accept the conditions set by the airline and unnecessarily forego refunds.

Ryanair has repeatedly adjusted its terms and conditions in recent years. Later bookings are subject to the newer terms and conditions. These provide for a revised choice of law clause. With this, Ryanair is trying to ensure that Irish law applies to contracts with the airline. This is because Ryanair hopes that under Irish law refund claims can be excluded more easily than, for instance, under German law (even though we do not share this legal viewpoint given that Ireland has substantially beefed up its protection of consumers recently by passing the Consumer Rights Act 2022.

In contrast to the old choice of law clause, the judicial review of the newer one is still partly ongoing. However, various rulings have already been issued confirming the invalidity of the new regulations, including from North Rhine-Westphalia as well as from the district courts in Nuremberg, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Bremen, Memmingen, Simmern, Bühl, Dresden and Königs Wusterhausen (BER Airport) (as of August 1, 2025).

In addition, the German Federal Court of Justice ruled in a landmark decision brought about by Refund Pilot on August 1, 2023 on a whole series of terms and conditions clauses of Ryanair in our favour (Case reference 118/22). The highest court considered it legally correct that the Regional Court of Memmingen, which had previously dealt with the case, had declared all the limitations of the refund claim in the airline’s terms and conditions to be invalid (see also the press coverage of the Federal Court of Justice ruling we won).

Based on the decisions to date, we therefore assume that most competent courts will equally find Ryanair’s new choice of law clause invalid as far as one of the aforementioned national jurisdictions with a codified statutory entitlement to a refund applies.

3. Special refund conditions for cancellations due to illness or death

Ryanair shows different levels of willingness to refund in cases of death (see a.) and serious illness (see b.).

a. Refund in case of death

In the event of a death in the traveller’s immediate family, Ryanair is customer-friendly and refunds the full travel price upon request and proof (e.g., submission of a death certificate).

However, the refund is not provided in cash, but as a voucher. The credit can be redeemed for booking new flights for twelve months.

According to the terms and conditions and instructions on the homepage, a refund of the ticket price is only possible if a relative dies within 10 days before (!) the flight date and the traveller submits their refund request before the planned travel date (Section 10.3 of Ryanair’s terms and conditions). For later applications, the traveller depends on the airline’s goodwill. However, attempting to obtain a refund might still be worthwhile, as Ryanair makes the application process in bereavement cases relatively simple online.

It should be noted, however, that not every family member’s death permits a refund, but only that of „close family members“. These include spouses and life partners, as well as children, stepchildren, parents and stepparents.

The respective refund application must include the booking number, confirmation of the family relationship, and a copy of the death certificate.

b. Refund in case of illness

If a traveller is unable to take their flight due to a serious illness or even their own death, Ryanair proceeds on the principle of goodwill. The passenger explicitly has no statutory entitlement to a refund in this case. Instead, it is at the airline’s discretion to refund the ticket costs fully or partially to the customer concerned and any fellow travellers with the same booking reference in such cases.

Alternatively, the airline reserves the right to offer free rebooking after submission of the appropriate supporting documents.

You can find the required application form for goodwill refunds in case of death or illness here.

4. Special case: Entry ban or travel restriction

Even after the COVID-19 pandemic, entry restrictions or safety warnings apply to individual countries for various reasons from time to time – for example in the Middle East. If Ryanair cancels a flight due to such circumstances, various claims arise under the Air Passenger Rights Regulation (more on this shortly). For example, the right to a full ticket refund.

However, if a flight on a route affected by restrictions takes place as scheduled, Ryanair offers no special options for cancellation or refund. In the years 2020 to 2022, travellers could rebook certain flights free of charge even at short notice. Unfortunately, similar regulations or offers for affected flights in 2025 cannot be found on Ryanair’s website. The last opportunity for rebooking without fees only applied to bookings made before 30.09.2022. No comparable special conditions apply anymore (see also the section regarding rebookings).

So unless you’ve booked your flight with a Flexi-Plus fare, it’s likely that no special rebooking options are available to you if Ryanair operates a flight as scheduled. Even if you are individually prevented from travelling due to illness or travel restrictions, you may only rebook for additional fees of €45 per flight and person. Alternatively, travellers still have the statutory refund claim if they don’t take the flight and leave the tickets unused.

If Ryanair itself cancels a flight or reschedules it to another time, Ryanair usually voluntarily complies with your passenger rights. If such a case occurs, customers are typically notified by text message or email. However, the airline strongly recommends checking the flight status of your connection online via your user account. Should Ryanair cancel a flight, an affected passenger has three different options according to Article 8 of the Air Passenger Rights Regulation:

A. Free rebooking

The first option is to switch free of charge to another Ryanair flight with a different departure and destination airport. Note: Differences in booking prices must be borne by the passenger, so you may have to pay a surcharge for the new flight. The passenger can rebook online via their user account.

B. Voucher

Alternatively, the airline issues the traveller a voucher valid for twelve months in the amount of the booking price. To meet the deadline, you must book a new flight and pay with the voucher within twelve months. However, the travel date of this new flight may well be later, without this preventing the redemption of the voucher.

C. Refund of the booking price

The third option is the refund of the full flight price by Ryanair in money. For the refund, the passenger must fill out a form on Ryanair’s website. According to customer reports, the airline typically processes the request promptly and without major resistance.

In this way, Ryanair at least formally complies with the passenger’s claim according to Article 8 of the Air Passenger Rights Regulation. This states that travellers always have a right to a cash refund of the paid flight price in the case of a flight cancellation by the airline. Passengers can voluntarily accept a voucher instead, but they don’t have to.

Important to know: In case of flight cancellation, the right to a ticket refund exists independently of a possible claim to a lump-sum flight compensation of up to €600. This is because the refund claim only replaces the otherwise existing right to transportation. The compensation claim, on the other hand, is intended to compensate for the inconveniences associated with the cancellation by Ryanair. Therefore, there are additional requirements for the claim to flight compensation. We have compiled these in the linked article.

III. Refund for cancellation – how to enforce your claim?

Once it’s clear how much in taxes and fees is generally refundable for your flight, the follow-up question remains: which way is most likely to result in a complete repayment of this amount? What options are available to the passenger to enforce the claim? Three options are conceivable:

1. enforcement on your own (more on this under 1.);

2. legal pursuit through a lawyer (more on this under 2.);

3. transferring your refund claim in exchange for a direct payment from a passenger rights website like Refund Pilot (more on this under 3.).

After explaining the three individual methods, we compare them at the end of the section in a case study (more on this under 4.).

1. DIY enforcement against Ryanair

Out-of-court request

To claim your refund, you can of course contact Ryanair yourself once you’ve explicitly cancelled or simply did not show up for the flight. However, Ryanair’s online form is not helpful here because it’s only intended for refunding government taxes minus the processing fees. As described above, this is usually not worthwhile because you’re only claiming a small part of your refund entitlement. Additionally, Ryanair’s processing fee often exceeds the amount of taxes saved, so the airline voluntarily pays out nothing in the end.

However, a request for the refund of all taxes and fees in the ticket price is possible by sending an email to the airline. For this purpose, you can have a free template for a claim letter created for your case below.

Even with a professional written request, however, difficulties regularly arise. This is because Ryanair makes it clear under Section 4.2 of the terms and conditions that, except in special cases, they will only voluntarily refund taxes and fees to a very limited extent and only upon payment of a processing fee. This is also confirmed by the experience reports on Ryanair’s payment behaviour that we’ve compiled under the link. A simple request for a refund from the airline is therefore usually not enough.

Judicial pursuit of the refund claim

Every air passenger also has the right to enter into a more serious legal dispute with the airline – through a dunning procedure or a lawsuit. Based on our experience, dunning procedures are not recommended because Ryanair almost always objects to the dunning notice. This redirects the dunning procedure into a regular civil lawsuit under most European jurisdictions anyway, only that it begins with a delay (see, for example, Section 696 Paragraph 1 of the German Code of Civil Procedure).

If you don’t want to accept Ryanair’s out-of-court rejection and don’t want to use our service either, your only option is to sue yourself. This is usually possible even without a lawyer because the amount to be refunded is usually less than €5,000 and therefore in most European countries it falls within the scope of local courts that do not require a party’s representation by a lawyer (see, for instance, Sections 23 No. 1, 78 Paragraph 1, 79 Paragraph 1 of the German Code of Civil Procedure).

Before filing a lawsuit, however, the traveller should first send an out-of-court claim letter to the airline. Otherwise, they might have to bear the legal costs even if they win the case. This is because Ryanair could then claim that they would have been willing to pay even without a lawsuit and that the plaintiff only caused unnecessary costs with the legal proceedings (see Section 93 of the German Code of Civil Procedure).

Otherwise, there are no fundamental hurdles for a lawsuit. In particular, air travellers don’t face any long-term disadvantages from the airline. Even Refund Pilot’s staff continues to fly completely problem-free with Ryanair on a regular basis, despite the fact that we enforce thousands of claims against the company each year.

However, measured against the refundable amount in dispute, a court proceeding on your own means disproportionate effort and legal cost risks in any case. Even if you assert your own claims without a lawyer, you must typically pay court fees in advance. These usually amount to at least €100, regardless where in Europe you file your lawsuit (as of August 1, 2025). However, Ryanair only has to reimburse this cost if the passenger wins the legal dispute. If the lawsuit gets dismissed, they are obliged to pay both the court costs and the opposing party’s lawyer’s fees. This quickly adds up to several hundred euros or pounds for the total legal costs.

2. Enforcement against Ryanair with a lawyer

With the help of legal support, the passenger no longer faces the airline alone. Engaging legal assistance reduces your own efforts and increases the chances of success in court, as a lawyer typically conducts the proceedings more professionally than a non-lawyer.

Nevertheless, your legal representative depends on your cooperation during the proceedings, because they naturally don’t know the facts of the case from the outset. Instead of corresponding and telephoning with the airline, in this approach you communicate to a certain extent with your lawyer and provide them with travel documents and other evidence. Even with this form of legal enforcement, you must therefore expect a certain amount of personal effort.

In principle, when engaging a lawyer, there is also a cost risk similar to that of enforcing a refund claim on your own. The only difference is that the expenses for your own lawyer are added on top of the court fees, whereas a cancelling Ryanair customer has to pay them in advance as well. This is because, much like courts, lawyers across Europe typically charge fees on a pay-to-play basis before performing their services. The airline, on the other hand, only has to cover these costs if and when you as a traveller win the legal dispute (see, for example, Section 91 Paragraph 2 of the German Code of Civil Procedure).

The cost risk can be explained very concretely as follows. In disputes about the refund of taxes and fees, Ryanair almost always insists on a court proceeding. In this, the airline relies on numerous provisions in its terms and conditions that are intended to limit your refund claim. However, many European courts now declare these clauses invalid.

In the following subsections we will cover a selection of them focussing on German court rulings. As described above, due to the EU’s Directive on Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts and its codification by national legislations across Europe, judges in other countries of the bloc and even in the UK will assess the lawfulness of terms and conditions under a comparable legal framework:

Choice of law clause

The choice of law clause states that Irish law should apply (Art. 2.4.1 and 2.4.2 of the terms and conditions). It has not yet been conclusively clarified whether a statutory entitlement to a refund exists within its scope of application. Ryanair denies exactly this. For air passengers, the choice of Irish law might thus be disadvantageous.

However, Ryanair’s provisions regarding the choice of law were considered invalid, at least in the old version, by, among others, the Higher Regional Court of Cologne, Decision of 29 January 2021, Case reference I-9 U 184/20; Regional Court of Cologne, Partial Judgment of 17.07.2020, Case reference 25 O 212/19, Regional Court of Frankfurt/Main, Judgment of 03.07.2020, Case reference 2-24 O 100/19, and Judgment of 25.11.2021, Case reference 2-03 O 527/19; District Court of Bühl, Judgment of 11.11.2019, Case reference 2 C 106/19).

And almost all German district courts as well as various regional courts now also declare Ryanair’s newly formulated choice of law clause invalid (for example, the Regional Court of Frankfurt am Main with its Judgment of 19.01.2023, 2-24 S 74/22, the Regional Court of Nuremberg with its Decision of 05.10.2022, 5 S 2442/22, the Regional Court of Hamburg with its Decision of 25.07.2022, 320 S 8/22, the Regional Court of Memmingen with its Decision of 23.11.2022, 14 S 1435/22, and the Regional Court of Bad Kreuznach with its Decision of 09.11.2022, 1 S 58/22).

Jurisdiction clause

Ryanair’s terms and conditions then stipulate that it is only permissible to assert claims against Ryanair before Irish courts. According to the judgment of the Federal Court of Justice of 12.5.2020, Case reference X ZR 10/19, and the judgment of the European Court of Justice of 18.11.2020, Case reference C-519/19, despite such provisions, the courts at the location of the departure and destination airports are always also competent for lawsuits concerning refund claims. This is also confirmed by all of the regional court decisions mentioned above regarding the choice of law clause.

Exclusion of a refund of fees

Ryanair’s terms and conditions contain in Art. 4.2.1 Paragraph 2 a further provision which generally excludes the refund of fees and, in most booking classes, also of taxes. According to case law, however, a refund of both taxes and fees is provided for (see, for example, Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf, Judgment of 23.07.2020, Case reference 16 U 99/20; District Court of Frankfurt, Judgment of 25.11.2021, Case reference 30 C 2274/21 (25)). A limitation of this legal claim leads to an unreasonable disadvantage for air travellers and is therefore invalid according to Section 307 of the German Civil Code.

Processing fee

Although Ryanair only allows a refund of taxes in a few cases anyway, the airline, through Art. 4.2.1 Paragraph 3 Sentence 2 of its terms and conditions, still demands a substantial processing flat rate even for inquiries about these small partial amounts: the so-called „administrative fee“. A fee of €20 per person and flight is charged for processing a refund request. However, such high processing fees cannot be effectively agreed upon via terms and conditions under German law (see, for example, Berlin Court of Appeal, Judgment of 12.08.2014, Case reference 5 U 2/12; Federal Court of Justice, Decision of 21 April 2016, Case reference I ZR 220/14).

Exclusion period and formal requirement

According to Ryanair’s T&Cs, refund claims may only be asserted within one month after the flight date and only in writing – that is, by letter with your signature (cf. Section 126 of the German Civil Code). Such a regulation is, however, already invalid according to Section 309 No. 13 of the German Civil Code (see also Higher Regional Court of Cologne, Decision of 29 January 2021, Case reference I-9 U 184/20).

The disputed terms and conditions clause is also incompatible with Section 307 Paragraph 1 Sentence 1 of the German Civil Code (Regional Court of Frankfurt am Main, Partial Judgment of 03.07.2020, Case reference 2-24 O 100/19).

So far, the German courts have rejected all of Ryanair’s attempts to evade the statutory refund claim in case of cancellation. However, Ryanair continues to change its terms and conditions on an ongoing basis. Therefore, the judiciary is regularly asked anew to subject the current version to a content review and to assess clause by clause whether these are also invalid.

A lawyer who doesn’t regularly conduct such legal disputes may sometimes find it difficult to keep track of things. But this directly affects the chances of success in the process. This is because Ryanair’s lawyers typically respond to a lawsuit with powerful 20-page briefs full of objections. These can be refuted with persistent counter-argumentation. This is shown by the many cited court decisions against the airline. But from our experience, without the corresponding effort, it’s not necessarily possible to convince the respective responsible judge.

If you have legal expenses insurance, you can at least have your procedural costs covered. However, almost all insurance plans contain an excess. Even those with legal expenses insurance would therefore be affected by the legal cost risk at least partially. Up to a certain amount, they would also have to bear the lawyer and court costs in case of losing.

3. Enforcement with the help of a passenger rights website

With both of the aforementioned approaches, along with the cost risk, uncertainty remains until the end as to whether you as a passenger will ultimately receive your refund in the full claimable amount.

Our passenger rights website Refund Pilot (in German: Ersatz-Pilot) provides a convenient, safe and efficient alternative to get money back for your cancelled flight. We purchase affected travellers‘ claims for a partial refund of the ticket price and enforce them at our own expense. For each refund claim, we provide travellers with direct payments of 80-83% of the amount they are entitled to as Ryanair customers.

There are no hidden additional costs or subsequent fees. Due to our reasonable pricing and speedy payouts, we regularly receive top ratings in tests by comparison websites. The feedback from our customers on Trustpilot confirms this positive assessment.

This makes us the largest European provider on the market for direct ticket refunds in cases where a traveller cancels their flight themselves (as of August 1, 2025). Other well-known passenger rights companies, such as Flightright and Airhelp, on the other hand, only help with ticket refunds if the airline cancels a flight. Rightnow, the largest other provider for the refund of taxes and fees, to our knowledge, has terminated its service and filed for insolvency proceedings in 2025. Compared to other passenger rights websites offering a similar service to ours, according to test reports, we charge the lowest service fees and provide the highest payout amounts.

Our immediate refunds save users of our service a disproportionate cost risk of enforcement and their own time and effort. Additional costs such as court fees and lawyer’s fees are eliminated. Instead, the cancelling Ryanair customer immediately receives their partial refund minus a manageable and fixed commission of 17-20% including VAT, if the online review of their case is positive. Note that the credit to the affected person follows 1-3 days after application.

In all of this, users of our refund service don’t risk any disadvantage from the airline. To our knowledge, Ryanair does not maintain a „blacklist“ with customers of Refund Pilot. We also don’t know of any case in which Ryanair has made it difficult for a user to be transported on a flight. And this despite our intensive legal disputes with the airline since 2017. Even the employees of Refund Pilot continue to travel undisturbed and without problems on flights of the airline.

Limitation of the availability of our service for foreign air travellers

Please note that we can unfortunately only provide our direct refund service for air travellers with habitual residence in Germany and Austria so far. The reason for this is that there is no precedent yet on whether statutory entitlements to a refund regarding taxes and fees are unlawfully curtailed by Ryanair’s terms and conditions in legal systems other than the German and Austrian ones as well.

At the same time, air travellers who live neither in Germany nor in Austria are subject to either the law of their country of residence or the national law that applies at the airline’s headquarters (in the case of Ryanair, for example, Irish law), depending on the flight route. We covered this above in greater detail. This follows from Article 5 Paragraph 2 of the European Rome I Regulation. We therefore regret and ask for your understanding that we cannot yet offer direct refunds for flight cancellations to customers with residential addresses outside Germany and Austria yet.

However, we are currently conducting various pilot proceedings to clarify whether a comparable refund claim is also available to air travellers with residences outside Germany and Austria. If this can be determined in the trial court proceedings, we will continuously expand our refund service for travellers with habitual residence abroad.

4. Case study of cancelling Ryanair flights: Your claim with and without a Passenger rights website

In this section, we calculate an example to show how high the refundable portions are for each strategy of enforcing the claim. This should give you a practical impression of how much of your ticket price you can reclaim when cancelling typical Ryanair flights. You can find another example of the alternatives for claiming ticket refunds in video format under the link. If you want to check the refund amount for a different flight connection, our refund calculator can help you free of charge and without obligation.

We’ll look at the example of a Ryanair flight from Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER) to London Stansted (STN) on May 14, 2025 and the return flight on May 21, 2025. The total price of the flight tickets for two passengers in the Regular fare was €180.66 (€90.33 per person) in our test booking.

Option 1: Cancellation / No-show for the flight, refund application with Ryanair

You don’t take your flight with Ryanair and submit an online application on the airline’s homepage for a refund of the amount included in the ticket price for government taxes:

Unfortunately, Ryanair’s fee for processing your application is €20 per person and flight, so in this case with 2 passengers each with an outbound and return flight, that’s €80. These processing fees are almost always higher than the taxes incurred on a flight route – as in this example. Here, the refundable €15.53 air passenger duty per passenger for the outbound flight and the £13 Air Passenger Duty per passenger for the return flight are each significantly lower than the processing fee of €20 per person and flight set by Ryanair. Therefore, you won’t receive any refund from the airline:

= €0 refund of the ticket price

Option 2: Enforcement of the claim via Refund Pilot

If you decide against direct clarification with the airline or if Ryanair refuses to give you a refund, you have the option of applying for a direct refund from Refund Pilot for your reclaim of taxes and fees instead.

To determine the refund amount, Refund Pilot’s refund calculator automatically adds up not just all taxes, but also all refundable fees after entering the flight data. This step is free and non-binding. In the case study, the following taxes and fees apply per passenger:

€15.53 Air Passenger Tax (Germany) according to Section 11 Para. 1 Air Transport Tax Act

€7.38 Airport fee for handling at Berlin Brandenburg Airport according to Fee Schedule 2025

€9.37 Fees for security control at Berlin Brandenburg Airport according to Announcement of the Federal Ministry of the Interior of 20.11.2024 based on the Air Security Fee Regulation

€0.89 PRM levy (Berlin Brandenburg Airport) according to Fee Schedule 2025

€0.52 Aircraft noise fee (Berlin Brandenburg Airport) according to Fee Schedule 2025

£15,64 / ~ €14.30 Air Passenger Duty / British Air Transport Levy (Air Passenger Duty)

£15,64 / ~ €17.20 Airport fee for handling at London Stansted Airport according to Fee Schedule 2024/2025

£0.69 / ~ €0,76 Regulatory Charge (London Stansted Airport) according to Fee Schedule 2024/2025

£0.80 / ~ €0.88 PRM levy (London Stansted Airport) according to Fee Schedule 2024/2025

Adding up the individual values results in a refundable amount of €66.83 per passenger. Since flights for two passengers are cancelled in the example case, the refundable taxes and fees total twice that amount, i.e., €133.66. Refund Pilot deducts a commission of 20% including VAT from this, i.e., an amount of €26.73. Besides this, Refund Pilot doesn’t charge any hidden additional fees. There are no further deductions. The cancelling Ryanair passenger is paid a refund of

€106.93 immediately and without risk.

This refund is noticeably more worthwhile than settling for the refund options that Ryanair voluntarily offers.

By the way: If the affected person in the example case decided to enforce their claim themselves, they could potentially collect the entire refundable amount of €133.66 without deductions. However, they would have to enforce the claim against the airline on their own, would bear the risk of legal costs, and would have the effort of a legal dispute lasting several months, which usually has to be fought in court. Whether the chance of getting an additional €26.73 is worth this effort is something everyone must decide for themselves.

IV. Free letter template for cancelling & claiming ticket refunds from Ryanair

Refund entitlements for self-cancelled flights are governed by national legislation rather than the EU Air Passenger Rights Regulation. The latter does not contain provisions for passenger-initiated cancellations. The relevant law depends on your residential country and the routing of your flight. Although several European nations such as Germany and Austria acknowledge passengers‘ rights to tax and fee refunds, this position is not uniformly adopted throughout Europe (more on this above).

Using the following form, you can generate a letter to cancel flights with Ryanair and request the airline to pay you a ticket refund for free. After completing the form, you’ll receive an email with the airline’s contact details and explanations on how to use the template. Based on your entries in the online form below, we’ll automatically adapt the template to your specific case. You’ll then receive a personalised draft for the letter to the airline via email. If you prefer to fill in the template manually later, you can also leave the input fields blank. In that case, we’ll send you an empty template.

We’ll also give you a tip on how to fill it out if you’re unsure about the amount of refundable taxes and fees for your cancelled flight. In such cases, their amount can be determined free of charge via our compensation calculator.

Questions & answers about cancelling a Ryanair flight

Here we’ve compiled further answers to important questions about cancellation and ticket refunds for Ryanair flights:

About the author

This article was published by Laura Held on August 1, 2025. Laura Held studied Business Administration, completed her Master’s degree in 2020 and has been strengthening Refund Pilot’s team since March 2021 (more about her CV in her Xing profile). She occasionally supports the online editorial team of our passenger rights website with articles on travel-related topics.

Dr. Christopher Wekel has verified the factual accuracy of the (legal) information in the article. He works as a lawyer at the Hamburg law firm Pale Bridge Rechtsanwälte and advises Refund Pilot on travel law issues. In this capacity, he frequently writes expert opinions on air passenger and traveller rights and evaluates relevant case law.