When the airline simply does not reply

On this page 17

1. Why airlines go quiet
2. Day 0: make the claim escalation-ready
3. Day 14: one chase, and only one
4. Day 21: pick a route and use it
5. Correspondence does not stop the clock
6. What not to do
7. Social media, and when it genuinely helps
8. Is this the moment for a claim company?
9. If the airline has gone out of business
10. Worth remembering
11. Writing to someone rather than something
12. Keep a one-line log
13. What a substantive reply actually is
14. Several claims against the same airline
15. The realistic outcome
16. A note on tone
17. If you eventually get a refusal instead of silence

There are two ways a claim fails. The airline refuses it, which gives you something to argue with. Or the airline says nothing at all, which gives you nothing — and is far more common than most people expect.

The mistake almost everyone makes is treating silence as a delay rather than a decision, and responding by waiting. Waiting is exactly what an unanswered claim is designed to produce.

Why airlines go quiet

Not usually malice, and rarely a considered decision about your flight. Claims arrive in enormous volume and are processed by systems that triage on cause codes. A claim that does not fit a template, or that arrives during a disruption spike, can sit unallocated indefinitely. Nobody has decided anything about it.

Which tells you something useful: continuing to write to the same channel is unlikely to change the outcome, because the problem is not that your argument was unpersuasive. The problem is that no one has read it. What changes things is moving the claim somewhere a human must respond.

Day 0: make the claim escalation-ready

The single highest-value thing you can do is write the opening claim as though it will be read by a regulator, because it may be. Include:

1. Booking reference and the operating flight number.
2. Scheduled and actual arrival at your final destination, with the doors-open time.
3. The great-circle distance and the band it produces.
4. The amount claimed per passenger and in total, with every name.
5. A request for payment by bank transfer within 14 days, declining vouchers.
6. A sentence stating that you will refer the matter to the national enforcement body and pursue it through the courts without further notice if no substantive reply is received.

That last line is not a threat, it is a date-stamped record that you gave them the opportunity. Every escalation route asks whether you tried to resolve it directly first. This is how you demonstrate it.

Use the airline's own claim form so a reference number is generated, then screenshot the submission and email it to yourself. Claims vanishing from airline systems is a persistent complaint, and reconstructing one you cannot prove you sent is painful.

Day 14: one chase, and only one

Short, factual, and attaching the original:

Do not restate the argument, do not add new points, and do not apologise for chasing. You are creating a record, not negotiating.

Day 21: pick a route and use it

Three realistic options, and the right one depends on where you flew from and how quickly you want resolution.

The national enforcement body

Every country has one, and the relevant body is generally the one for the departure country rather than the airline's home country. Free, documentary, and slow — months rather than weeks. Its value is that it produces an official determination and that airlines engage with it in a way they do not engage with individual letters.

Passengers routinely write to the wrong regulator and lose months. If you departed Madrid on a German airline, the Spanish body has jurisdiction over the flight.

An ADR scheme

For UK departures, many airlines belong to an alternative dispute resolution scheme whose decisions bind the airline. Free to use, typically a couple of months, and it removes the one thing that puts most people off doing this themselves — the prospect of a court.

If the airline belongs to a scheme, this is usually the best first escalation. How the regulator and ADR routes work.

A small court claim

The fastest route for a clear-cut claim. The online process takes about twenty minutes, the fee is added to your claim if you win, and no solicitor is needed. Airlines settle a meaningful proportion before any hearing, because allocating a defence costs more than the claim is worth.

This is also the only step that reliably stops the limitation clock. How to file.

Correspondence does not stop the clock

Worth stating plainly because it changes how you should behave. An airline that takes nine months to reply has not extended your deadline by nine months, and a regulator sitting on your file does not pause it either. Only issuing proceedings reliably does.

In the UK and Ireland this is comfortable — six years, five in Scotland. Elsewhere it is tight: two years in the Netherlands and Italy, three in Germany running to the end of the calendar year. If your claim is governed by a short period and you have already burned eight months in correspondence, go straight to court rather than to a regulator. Deadlines by country.

What not to do

• Do not keep writing. A third, fourth and fifth letter to a channel that has not responded to the first two achieves nothing except the passage of time.
• Do not accept a voucher out of fatigue. Months of silence makes any offer look attractive. Compensation is payable in money.
• Do not start again with a new claim. It resets any internal ageing on the original and loses your 14-day record.
• Do not assume silence means the claim is weak. Nobody has assessed it.

Social media, and when it genuinely helps

Public posts occasionally shake loose a stalled claim, because the teams that handle them are separate from claims processing and have discretion. It is worth one attempt, framed factually — flight, date, reference number, how long it has been — rather than angrily.

But do not mistake a response for progress. A social media reply apologising and promising to look into it is not a decision, and the clock keeps running. Treat it as a bonus rather than a step on the ladder.

Is this the moment for a claim company?

Honestly, sometimes yes. Silence is the scenario where paying a third is most defensible: the airline has not engaged, you would have to escalate, and the realistic alternative is that you abandon the claim.

Before you do, check two things. Whether the airline will deal with third-party firms at all — some actively will not, which makes the fee pure loss. And whether a free ADR route exists for your flight, because if it does, the firm's main value is doing something you could have done at no cost. The honest comparison.

If the airline has gone out of business

A different situation. Statutory compensation becomes a claim in an insolvency, which realistically means little or nothing. Where the flight formed part of a package, the organiser's insolvency protections may cover refunds and repatriation. Where you paid by credit card, card protection rules may assist with the cost of the flight itself — though not usually with the compensation.

Worth remembering

Three weeks and two letters, then move. The passenger who escalates at day 21 and the passenger who writes politely for nine months have the same claim; one of them is simply much closer to being paid.

Writing to someone rather than something

Claims forms route into queues. Named individuals have inboxes they are accountable for. Where a claim has gone unanswered for a month, a short, courteous letter to the airline's registered office addressed to the company secretary or the customer director frequently produces movement that fifteen portal submissions did not.

Keep it brief and unemotional: the flight, the reference, the date you claimed, the amount, and a note that you have received no substantive response and intend to escalate. You are not expecting that person to handle it personally. You are putting the claim somewhere it has to be allocated to a human, and creating a record that correspondence reached the company at its registered address — which matters if you later have to say where you sent things.

Registered office addresses are public and take a minute to find in the relevant companies register.

Keep a one-line log

Date sent, channel used, reference received, date of any reply, what it said. Five columns in a note on your phone.

This sounds fussy and it is the single most useful thing you will have at escalation. Every route — a regulator, an ADR scheme, a court — asks for the chronology of your attempts to resolve the matter directly, and reconstructing it from a year of scattered emails is far more work than maintaining it as you go. It also protects you against the common airline response that it has no record of your original claim.

What a substantive reply actually is

Worth defining, because airlines send a good deal of correspondence that looks like engagement and is not. An acknowledgement that your claim has been received is not a decision. A message saying the matter is under investigation is not a decision. An apology for the disruption, without addressing the claim, is not a decision.

A substantive reply either pays, or refuses and states a reason. Anything else leaves your 21-day clock running, and you should treat it that way rather than restarting the count each time an automated acknowledgement arrives. Airlines that send a holding message every fortnight can keep a claim alive indefinitely if you let the holding messages reset your timetable.

Several claims against the same airline

If you have more than one disrupted flight outstanding — which is common for frequent flyers who go back through old bookings — submit them separately with separate references, but escalate them together. A regulator complaint or a court claim covering three flights on the same airline is barely more work than one, and it tends to concentrate the airline's attention considerably more than a single small sum does.

Do not, however, combine them into a single original claim to the airline. A composite claim gets answered on its weakest flight and closed as a whole.

The realistic outcome

Most claims that reach the escalation stage are resolved there rather than at a hearing or a final regulator determination. Airlines settle when a claim stops being an entry in a queue and becomes something that requires a named person to prepare a response by a date someone else has set.

That is the entire logic of the 21-day timetable. You are not trying to win an argument with the claims department; you are trying to move the claim out of the queue where arguments are never read.

A note on tone

Angry letters do not get paid faster. The people who eventually read your claim had nothing to do with the delay and are assessing whether the airline owes money, not whether you were treated badly. A short, precise, slightly dull letter stating a figure and a legal basis is read as a claim that will be pursued. A long, aggrieved one is read as a complaint that may go away.

This is not a point about politeness for its own sake. It is that the two documents get sorted into different queues, and only one of those queues leads to a payment.

If you eventually get a refusal instead of silence

Treat that as progress rather than a setback. A refusal commits the airline to a stated reason, and a stated reason can be tested — against the departure board, against what you were told on the day, against the case law on technical faults and crew shortages. Silence gives you nothing to work with; a bad reason gives you quite a lot.

So when the reply finally arrives, read what it actually says the cause was, and go from there rather than from the fact that it said no.

A reason you can test is worth more than a silence you cannot.

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