Frequently Asked Questions

Using our compensation calculator is free of charge. Filing a request does not incur any charges either.

Only in case a request is accepted, we charge our service fee, which is already deducted from the face value of your claim. We then pay you the remainder as indicated in the compensation calculator. Should we accept your request, we will pay you the amount previously disclosed without any further deduction. Find further information about our commission and the amounts to be paid out here.

Refund Pilot will validate the data entered once more and will then confirm your request for compensation at the conditions that were suggested via email. Afterwards, Refund Pilot will pay you the compensation in the amount that was agreed upon. If anything remains unclear in the meantime, please do not hesitate to contact us at any time with regard to any questions you might have.

Once we email you the confirmation related to your request for compensation, we ask you to let us know your bank details. Upon entering this information in another online form, we will transfer the promised compensation within only a few days.

Yes, as long as you have the power to represent them (e.g. as parents of minor passengers or by means of power of attorney).

We offer our compensatory payments for flight irregularities that occur on flights departing from airports within Germany. The same applies to flights landing in the country provided that the air carrier has its main office in the EU.

Our refund service for cancelled flights is available for flights departing or arriving in Germany as well.

As we do not cooperate with lawfirms outside Germany that could represent us  in foreign courts to enforce passenger rights, we are currently unable to extend our service to other European jurisdictions.

German law states that claims for compensation or refunds related to flight irregularities come under the statute of limitations after three years. Our compensation and refund services may thus be used as long as the affected flight took place within the last three years.

We compensate cancellations and flight delays that exceed three hours. Furthermore, we grant compensation, should you have been denied to board an aircraft due to overbooking.

In addition we can offer you a partial refund of your fare if you had to cancel your trip. To check your eligibility in either case, please refer to our compensation calculator.

No compensation applies to situations in which the flight irregularity was caused by extraordinary circumstances and it would have been undue for the air carrier to remedy them. Such circumstances are, for example, at hand in case of strikes or natural disasters. Whether or not the cause of your flight irregularity is to be deemed extraordinary can be found out by evaluating your individual case in our compensation calculator.

The delay of your flight is based on how long after the planned time of arrival the actual arrival took place. When your flight was supposed to arrive at your destination at 2:20 PM, yet it arrived at 4:00 PM only, a delay of 1:40 h occurred. An aircraft has arrived at the very moment in which at least one door has been disarmed and opened and passengers are able to disembark.

Compensation applies only in case you have been at the airport for check-in at least 45 minutes prior to departure or in case you were ready to board the aircraft when you were notified of the cancellation. In case of cancellations, you are not required to board the aircraft of an alternative flight to which you are rebooked. With respect to delayed flights, however, you must have participated in the flight in order to qualify for compensation.

Having booked your flight with bonus miles does not preclude any compensation. The only flights not eligible for a compensation are free flights and such flights for which tickets were purchased that were not available to the general public, e. g., flights that are booked under a employee discount scheme.

Having booked your flight as part of a package deal does not preclude any compensation.

Passengers on business travel are entitled to a compensation, too.

In principle, having been issued a meal or travel voucher by the air carrier does not preclude any compensation. Preclusion only takes place once you and the air carrier have agreed to settle your claim for compensation in exchange for a certain performance (e.g. by accepting a voucher through email correspondence).

Furthermore, no direct payment is to be made by Refund Pilot in case the air carrier has already paid your claim in full. This also applies to cases in which you have filed for compensation with other service providers such as Flightright and have been paid compensation by this provider or are expecting a payout.

In order to file for compensation with us, please fill in our compensation calculator first with your flight data. In case the automated check confirms that you are entitled to receive compensation, you may claim for compensation online under the conditions that will be stated.

Once we confirm your application, we will pay you the amount that has already been indicated to you in the compensation calculator (€150 to €450) in exchange for your claim for compensation towards the air carrier.

Claims for compensation may only be filed using the online form as this form asks all questions that are relevant to determine a user’s eligibility step by step. These questions are based on case law in travel law and claim requirements under the EU Flight Compensation Regulation. By using our online form, all data necessary to handle your case will be collected in a systematic matter; thanks to connections to several databases, many fields will fill automatically.

This makes it as easy as possible to inform us about the relevant facts. We, on the other hand, are able to handle your case efficiently which makes it possible for us to pay you an above-average compensation payment.

The compensation calculator is a web-based software module which, based on an automated logic, provides you with an initial estimate of the extent to which you are entitled to compensation for which Refund Pilot is willing to pay you the amount indicated immediately.

The online form will guide you through relevant questions arising from case law in travel matters and the eligibility requirements of the EU Flight Compensation Regulation. Our web application provides you with no more and no less than an initial overview of whether or not you are likely to be entitled to compensation.

Should Refund Pilot’s compensation calculator indicate that the chances of success for the claim are too low, this means that Refund Pilot will not process your case. This is not to say that you are not entitled to compensation, but simply that Refund Pilot does not recognize a claim for which a direct payment can be offered.

Of course, you are free to contact the airline or a lawyer or another service provider directly and still try to enforce the claim for compensation.

If a flight is delayed or cancelled, Refund Pilot offers passengers the fastest and most reliable compensation option: We pay you a fair amount for your claim against the airline in record time. All you have to do is fill out our online form and send us a scan of your booking confirmation or your boarding pass.
Thus, Refund Pilot is the most convenient way for passengers to obtain compensation for their flight irregularities.

Alternative compensation methods, on the other hand, usually turn out to be more complicated and stressful upon being inspected more closely: Those who experience a flight irregularity would, naturally, first contact their air carrier to claim a flight compensation. Unfortunately, air carriers often do not respond to such inquiries at all. If they do, they usually throw supposedly valid reasons at passengers as to why there is allegedly no obligation to pay compensation in their individual cases.

Therefore, professional legal assistance is often required in order to reveal gaps in the air carriers’ attempts to justify themselves and to confidently conduct a legal dispute in court. In order to enforce claims against an air carrier, however, a lawyer will usually demand procedural fees in advance, which will only be reimbursed if you end up with some success in court against your air carrier. However, this is by no means certain, as only a few experts in travel law are able to compete with the lawyers employed by air carriers. These are mainly found among big collection services such as Flightright, which do not charge you any legal fees, but retain a performance fee if your air carrier is ordered to pay you compensation.

Although this approach does not leave you with any cost risk, it still turns out to be a cumbersome way. This is because enforcing your claim in court may very well take longer than six months. In the meantime, you as the client remain indirectly involved in the proceedings via your debt collection service.

We believe, however, that especially after the strains of your flight, you cannot be expected to wait for months before you are compensated as you deserve. This is why we offer a simple alternative: You assign your claim against your air carrier to us and we will grant you compensation – immediately and in a similar amount as the one offered by debt collection services such as Flightright. This lets you receive the payment as stress-free as your air carrier should actually have carried you to your destination on your flight.

Several air carriers do not simply meet their payment obligations. They ignore direct requests from passengers or give supposedly valid reasons why there would be no obligation to pay in the respective case. Sometimes they offer passengers low-value vouchers to settle the claims which fall short of the actual amount of the claim for compensation.

Often air carriers deliberately expect passengers to be ignorant or assume that they will give up at some point in the future due to irritation and frustration. Our convenient solution helps you avoid any tedious argument with the air carrier and lets you receive your compensation immediately.

In principle, the cancellation of a flight from, to or within Europe entitles to a compensation of up to €600 per person. In cases that are related to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, we unfortunately have to deal with an unfavorable special constellation. This is because in the event of cancellations due to force majeure, an air carrier is, by way of exception, exempt from its obligation to pay.

Refund Pilot assumes that all flight irregularities which are directly or indirectly based on rescheduling made by air carriers due to the cancellation wave since March 2020, recommendations by the authorities, and/or travel restrictions can be excused with force majeure. The European Commission presents a similar assessment in its interpretation note on air passenger rights during the COVID-19 pandemic. In our opinion, no court will therefore dare blaming companies even for the self-restriction of travel by air carriers during the pandemic. Restrictions on air traffic, for example in the form of thinning out the flight schedule, may be partly due to economic reasons, but they also serve to contain the spread of the coronavirus and thus help in maintaining public health. In our opinion, courts will always give this priority over air passenger rights. If there is one thing that can be deemed an exceptional circumstance in the sense of the Flight Compensation Regulation and thus a reason for relief in the case of flight compensation obligations, it is the global major emergency caused by COVID-19.

We ask for your understanding that we therefore cannot offer direct payments in COVID-19 cases.

We do offer a refund service starting in November 2020. However, it is limited to reimbursements of taxes and fees included in fares for flights that passengers had to cancel themselves. For further information on our respective conditions, please refer to the respective subpage. If you want to check your eligibility for a specific flight, use our compensation calculator and enter the respective flight status telling us that you have cancelled the trip.

Other than that, we only make direct payments for claims to flat-rate flight compensation of up to €600 per person, which is intended to compensate for the inconvenience caused by a flight cancellation or delay. If a flight is cancelled without substitution, passengers usually have an additional claim for reimbursement of their booking price under Article 8 of the Flight Compensation Regulation – as compensation for the missing transportation. However, our service is not available for such ticket price refunds.

You might, however, find Myflyright useful, a website which specializes in the purchase of such claims. As far as we know, both FairPlane and Flightright have also included a similar offer in their spectrum of services, at least for COVID-19 cases.