Ellie Webb and her five friends from Cheshire were travelling back from Malia on the 7th July after their holiday to celebrate the end of their A-Level exams.
The group arrived at the airport for 11pm to give them plenty of time for their early morning flight that was scheduled to depart at 2.55am. But they were soon to find out that they would be faced with a four hour delay.
“We arrived at the Thomas Cook check-in desk at around 11pm as normal and there was no mention of any sort of delay.”
Once the group had checked in and gone through security they headed to the shops to buy some food and drink, oblivious that their flight was not going to be on time.
“It wasn’t until one of us went to look at the board to see which gate we would be boarding at that we noticed our flight was delayed.”
No information from Thomas Cook
Two hours had passed by and the girls had still not been informed by Thomas Cook about how much longer they would have to wait for their flight.
“We couldn’t find any Thomas Cook reps; there were only Greek airport staff around who spoke very little English. It was awful.”
Check Now To See If You Can Claim Compensation For A Flight Delay
The group eventually received food and drink vouchers along with all the passengers as part of Thomas Cook’s obligations under the European Regulation, EC 261/2004.
The girls weren’t satisfied by this, Ellie said “By this time, we were past hungry and were exhausted. The flight time was bad enough already, we just wanted to get home.”
Their delayed flight was finally called for boarding
“After waiting over three hours, we started boarding. We all got onto the bus and started to drive to the plane that was waiting on the tarmac.”
Passengers waited on the bus for 10 minutes when it suddenly started to drive back towards the airport.
“We had no idea what was going on!”
“As we headed back into the airport, Thomas Cook staff told us that the cabin crew on board had reached their maximum flight crew duty hours and could not fly with us back to Manchester.”
“It was just a disaster. Everyone was frustrated with Thomas Cook because they weren’t giving us any information. They weren’t even telling us why our flight was delayed!”
Luckily there was a cabin crew on standby which meant the passengers didn’t have to wait that much longer and eventually flew out four hours late.
“After four long hours we were finally on our way back home!”
Once the girls arrived home, one of their mother’s suggested finding out if they could claim compensation from their flight delay.
At first the one of the girls went directly to the airline to try and claim but Thomas Cook ‘brushed them off’ to say that because their delay was due to a technical fault, there was nothing the they could do.
Ellie then decided to type ‘flight delay compensation’ into Google which is when she came across FlightCompensation.com.
“It was such an easy process and it told me straight away if I had a valid claim.”
“There was no technical legal jargon to understand, it was put to us very simply and we were emailed frequently. I couldn’t believe how quickly the whole process was.”
It was FlightCompensation.com who told them that there had been a technical fault with the plane which caused the delay.
“I told all the girls how much we would get if our claim was successful and they were thrilled so I logged a claim for all of them. We had nothing to lose so thought ‘why not?!’”
“We were so happy when we received our flight compensation. It was more than we ever expected! I would 100% recommend your services to everyone.”