Berlin. Nov 23, 2020. As the extraordinary year 2020 draws to a close, we have a few positive announcements to make. So what is new?
As we normally write our blog posts in German, you might have already guessed from the language of this article that we finally completed the translation of our flight compensation website and its compensation calculator to English. We believe that this step was overdue to facilitate access to our services for users that do not speak German but that are travelling to and from the country and might therefore appreciate some help in cases of flight disruptions. To change the language the website is displayed in, simply click on “DE” or rather “EN” in the upper right corner of the website (or under the menu button at the top of the page on a phone’s screen).
Apart from the language extension, we have launched a ticket refund service through which we offer direct payments for claims to partial refunds of fares for trips passengers had to cancel themselves. The right to such a reimbursement has been confirmed by the German jurisdiction in the amount of unused taxes and fees, which airlines save in cases of no-shows but which they rarely return to their customers (even though they are obligated to do so). As you might know, these items included in the total fare often sum up to a few hundred Euros per round trip depending on the flight routes you booked. So if you are having a hard time reclaiming this sum from your carrier, we are now able to expedite that process by paying out 80-83% of the amount you are entitled to directly. That is probably more than the only competitor (Geld für Flug) we are aware of is offering through its refund service (even though we cannot tell exactly, because the company apparently does not deduct a standardized rate but rather sends out individual offers to applicants while stating that the maximum refund amounts to 75%) . For more information on how our refund service works and what we charge for it, please have a look at the respective diagram on our landing page or at the subpage dedicated to summarizing the terms and conditions for the new product.
Earlier this year, we also delivered on our promise to improve our compensation calculator to make it more user-friendly and to automatically examine disrupted flights in greater detail. Thanks to this, you may now apply for a compensation or refund faster than ever. Besides, the enhancement allows us to assess users’ cases in real time with more precision than before. You can check out the result by giving the online form a try for free to find out about your eligibility for our direct payments.
Furthermore, we have updated a lot of our IT infrastructure behind the scenes. While these results of our recent development efforts are not quite as visible as the ones mentioned above, they do make our service more convenient for users as well. For instance, we have connected additional external databases to our system to analyze our users’ flight irregularities as comprehensibly as possible. Thus, we are now in a position to cross-examine the validity of an airline’s objections against your claim with sophisticated knowledge of the incident in question. Should an airline deny your claim to compensation by pointing to force majeure or the lack of spare aircraft to arrange an alternative flight, we can quickly check whether this really has been the case. If our data casts doubt on the carrier’s version of events, we can still offer you a direct payment.
We hope you enjoy the expansion and upgrade of our lawtech services.
Julian Voss & Dr Christopher Wekel