A good day crossing the Pond

My time in Europe has come to an end and I'm writing these lines from Toronto Pearson Airport where I am unexpectedly connecting before heading home to Montreal. My original travel plans had me fly from Bologna to Frankfurt to Ottawa and then home to Montreal, but once I got to the boarding gate in Frankfurt I heard an announcement looking for volunteers to be offloaded due to an overbooking situation.

Needless to say I got to the desk before the agent even finished the announcement: it was still 1pm CEST, the day was still long and I knew there would be plenty of opportunities to get home on the same day. I had the emergency exit row, but I was ready to give it up for the very generous compensation. In fact, in accordance to the EU Regulation 261/2004, Air Canada offered me €600 cash or €900 in airline voucher, to be spent within 2 years on all Air Canada partners (essentially Star Alliance) but only valid to cover the airfare (no taxes or supplements, that normally make up a big chunk of the total fare).

For me an airline voucher is like cash: no problem at all spending it! And as an added bonus I got upgraded to Premium Economy on the 8-hour flight from Frankfurt to Toronto.

Due to my Gold Status with ANA (courteous status matching) I could access the Lufthansa Senator Lounge in Frankfurt, the Maple Leaf Lounge in Toronto (which was quite full due to a 45-minute ground stop earlier in the afternoon owing to thunderstorms) so it was actually quite good.

This is all to say that the EU Regulation 261 is actually very generous in most cases, including this one, where the inconvenience received is considerably overcompensated. I wish there could be a similar legislation in North America: here carriers can essentially leave you stranded for missed connections due to weather. And if the same episode had happened to me on the flight in the opposite direction, Reg. 261 would have not applied and the treatment would have been certainly a lot less generous.

The EU has created a very tight environment for airline passengers, who enjoy the best rights in the world: a friend told me that Alitalia was fined over €1m for "unsuitable assistance" provided to passengers during delays and cancellations. I remember the "good old days" when it was possible for Ryanair (and other airlines, but the Irish carrier was the main culprit) to just cancel a flight, refund the passengers the €20 they had paid and abandon them to their own destiny: whenever a flight from a base to a destination was diverted, for whatever reason, Ryanair would cancel the flight back to the base, reposition aircraft and crew and operate the next rotation as "on time" as possible.

It's a good thing that these episodes are part of the past, but it remains to be seen whether this legislation is going to make flying more expensive in the long run. The era of €0.01 fares is over, but that was mainly because of the oil shock of 2008. Competition has so far kept prices at bay, and ancillary revenues are providing carriers around the world (but especially in Europe and North America) a very unusual period of profitability. Let's see if it lasts.