Review of Flightright in 2021: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Fees, Convenience & Customer Opinion

Before analyzing Flightright’s conditions in detail, this article will first provide a brief overview on the different cases of flight disruptions for which the company offers its services. This is because the array of passenger rights which Flightright can help enforce has widened considerably following the spread of coronavirus.

Until the beginning of 2020, Flightright only offered to assert claims to flight compensation for delays or cancellations on behalf of its customers. Airlines owe passengers this lump sum of up to €600 p.p. to reimburse them for the inconvenience suffered due to the flight disruption but not as a substitute for the transportation service.

In consequence, travellers are entitled to the latter as well or – if they are not offered an alternative flight – to a refund of the fare. This second type of reimbursement gained tremendous relevance in the course of the corona pandemic because airlines sought to issue vouchers instead of paying back cash.

This is why Flightright decided to extend its service to enforce claims to refund a fare, too. For this purpose, the air passenger rights company introduced a second online form to check users‘ eligibility to ticket refunds.

If Flightright finds that a passenger qualifies, it offers to enforce the respective claim for free if the airline makes a payment within 7 days. If the case takes longer but can be settled out of court, Flightright charges a 14% success fee plus VAT. Should legal action become necessary, this rate doubles.

However, Flightright operates on a „no win, no fee“ basis in this regard as well. Therefore, it will only deduct its success rate once the airline makes a payment so that customers run no risk in hiring Flightright.

In the event of a delay of more than three hours or another severe flight irregularity, art. 7 para. 1 of Regulation (EC) No. 261/2004 entitles air passengers to a lump-sum compensation of

• € 250 in cases of short trips (up to 1,500 kilometers / 932 miles),
• € 400 in cases of medium-haul routes (up to 3,500 kilometers / 2,175 miles) and
• € 600 in cases of long-distance flights to or from a destination outside of Europe.

Said amounts are granted per passenger, not just per booking. If (and only if) such claims are successfully enforced by Flightright, the company will in any case retain 20 to 30 % of their face value plus VAT as a fee for its services. Consequently, the payout to each customer can amount to

• € 160.75 to € 190.50 for short distance flights,
• € 257.20 to € 304.80 for medium-haul flights and
• € 385.80 € to € 457.20 for long distance flights.

Since 2019, Flightright deducts an additional surcharge of 14 percent if a lawyer is needed to pursue a claim. Before we go into more detail regarding these supplemental deductions, however, we would like to explain further what basic fee in the range of 20-30 percent a customer typically has to expect.

Flightright has not published any information about when and how often the company charges rather high rates and when its more favorable conditions apply. However, a tangible guideline for its usual basic fee without the litigation surcharge is given if one assumes the arithmetic mean, i.e. 25% plus VAT.

Our examination of success fees charged in cases of various individual flights indicates that this is by no means an exaggeration of the average amount retained by Flightright. Instead, the sample suggests that the company usually charges a basic rate of 28% plus VAT.

If Flightright merely deducted the service fee, the company would outperform at least some of its competitors in terms of the payout ratio. However, Flightright’s costs are not always limited to the typical 28% basic rate. This is because the company often adds surcharges which are not displayed on its main page or in its ads but only in the online form (in the German version) shortly before a binding request is submitted by a customer (see the following screenshot from October 10, 2020):

Surprisingly, as of May 1, 2021, the surcharge is not mentioned in the English version of the form (whereas the English GTC make reference to it).

If an airline does not pay without the assistance of an attorney, Flightright will charge its customers an additional 14% legal action fee (plus VAT). This will be subtracted from the compensation amount paid to the passenger in addition to the basic fee. Whether the lawyer’s surcharge is added is determined by the General Terms and Conditions of Flightright: „If Flightright’s endeavours to enforce the Claim are insufficient but there are reasonable chances of success, we may engage a contract lawyer to enforce the Claim” (See point 1.3 of Flightright’s GTC).

This means: Even the extrajudicial reminder letter from a lawyer after the initial request by Flightright and even more so the filing of a lawsuit will increase the fee the company charges. At the same time, the service provider will only waive the lawyer’s surcharge if it merely has to send a simple extrajudicial claim letter to the airline.

Flightright does not explicitly state how often it must take additional legal action to enforce claims for flight compensation on behalf of its customers. However, if the frequency of legal proceedings is 60-80% across all disputes, as is the case with other passenger rights companies, a customer can well expect to pay the lawyer’s surcharge in addition to the basic fee. This typically results in a higher overall rate than the ones Flightright’s competitors are asking for.

Assuming a 28% basic fee and 19% VAT, Flightright’s customers will receive only about half of their claims’ face value if legal action becomes necessary, namely

• €125.05 for short distance flights,
• €200.08 for medium-haul flights and
• €300.12 for long distance flights.

If you regard this scenario as common (due to reasons stated above), Flightright’s compensation payout amount falls short of the average. Since Flightright does not publish any statistics regarding the percentage of cases requiring legal proceedings, one can only speculate how often the passenger rights company charges the mere basic fee without the surcharge for legal action.

But even if one assumes that in one’s own case no legal action for debt recovery will be necessary, one should take into account: Flightright charges the small commission only where a simple extrajudicial request from the airline is sufficient for payment and no lawyer is involved.

In such advantageous cases, the air traveller could also enforce the compensation payment himself and save the fee for a service provider altogether. In reality, however, such constellations are rather the exception (see the detailed description in our article on ways to enforce claims to flight compensation).

Our analysis of Flightright’s terms and conditions therefore revealed that at the present time, the company typically pays out substantially lower compensation amounts than other service providers. Who pays out how much in which cases is explained in our overall comparison of the different passenger rights companies.

In any event, Flightright and Airhelp charge the highest rates for a risk-free enforcement service across the industry.

The only exceptions occur when Flightright publishes a promotion code, hands out vouchers or grants a discount. However, this only happens irregulary and merely through specific channels. Whereas public coupon platforms sometimes still mention special conditions as well, they only reflect the usual rates Flightright offers upon closer inspection. So as long as Flightright does not target you through an exclusive advertising campaign, you should expect the standard conditions described above.

Payout amount of Flightright compared

Flightright is a so-called collection service provider.

This means that the company only pays its customers the promised compensation once a passenger’s claim against the airline in question has been fully enforced and yielded a payment to Flightright. Depending on the case and the airline, the the waiting time until this happens varies considerably.

In some cases, airlines are cooperative and pay out the compensation they owe after the first request. If Flightright then forwards the amount promptly, a customer will ideally have a waiting period of „only“ three to five weeks between the first case check on Flightright’s website and the receipt of payment on his account. However, this constitutes the shortest possible duration of the enforcement process.

On the other hand, customer reviews suggest that there are often cases requiring the extrajudicial involvement of a lawyer or even a lawsuit. An extrajudicial pursuit of the claim by a lawyer takes one to three months. Furthermore, this measure can only be taken once Flightright must deem it necessary.

Otherwise, if Flightright sued right away, the company would not be entitled to a reimbursement of legal costs by the airline but would have to cover them by itself. This is because the German legal system and most other European jurisdications impose the costs of a legal dispute on the losing party only to the degree that they may be regarded as necessary. And this is typically not the case until an airline does not comply with an extrajudicial request within a reasonable period of time. In consequence, the time limit and a possible extended processing period requested by the airline must first pass by. Hence, if a lawyer has to be hired by Flightright at all, affected customers will have to wait at least two to four months until their compensation is paid out.

If a mere claim letter by a lawyer does not suffice and legal proceedings become necessary, the process takes even longer. How long exactly mostly depends on whether the sued airline is headquartered in the country of the competent court, in another member state of the EU or in a third country. Proceedings against national airlines or those with a legal representative that speaks the court’s language such as an attorney can be conducted without translations. Otherwise, the entire correspondence of the court case must be translated, which costs additional time.

While lawsuits against domestic airlines typically last four to ten months until they transfer the compensation they owe, proceedings against foreign airlines can drag on for more than a year. In customer ratings, you may sometimes even read about cases in which the court’s decision took two or three years.

Measured by the public feedback from customers, waiting for a payout by Flightright requires a few months of patience on average. Especially those who value a speedy enforcement of their passenger rights may therefore ask themselves: Does this duration resemble the market standard?

Certainly, this question cannot be answered in a straightforward way, because especially for collection service providers, the waiting time until a compensation is paid depends on the circumstances of the specific flight irregularity. Some airlines delay the reimbursement they owe longer than others. But at least it can be said that there are various air passenger rights agencies who help customers receive their flight compensation much faster than Flightright. To gain a better understanding about how individual competitors perform under this aspect, we recommend the respective overview in our article on the overall comparison of flight compensation companies.

Waiting time until payout by Flightright compared

Probably the most prominent selling point of Flightright is the following feature of its service: The customer does not incur any cost risk. That means a user does not need to pay for anything upfront – neither for Flightright’s activities, nor for legal fees or court costs. Instead, a passenger only pays a service fee to the company if it succeeds in enforcing a claim for compensation. The latter is simply deduced from the payout amount. In all fairness, however, all other passenger rights agencies follow the same business model.

Likewise, Flightright’s communication channels are also in line with the market standard: The company provides various relevant information in an FAQ area; if questions remain unanswered, an inquiry can be sent to its email address service@flightright.de. Besides, it used to be possible to contact the company via chat function in the FAQ area. However, the latter does not seem to be available permanently and could not be selected last time we checked on May 1, 2021.

Similarly, Flightright currently does not list a phone number in its contact details. In this respect some competitors such as Compensation2Go, Fairplane and EUflight distinguish themselves from Flightright by maintaining a hotline.

On the other hand, Flightright’s convenient online form sets the company apart from many of its rivals. It examines inquiries much more precisely than the systems of most competitors – apart from those offered by FairPlane and Refund Pilot. The form to apply for compensation is optimized for mobile use and can easily be used as a web application on a smartphone. The fact that Flightright does not have its own app, as far we can see, therefore does not restrict mobile users a lot.

In addition, Flightright’s online form automatically compares a user’s entries with flight information stored in its databases. In many cases, this spares the user from describing the flight irregularity in question manually. Instead, Flightright already determines many of the details of the incident through database queries in the background. For instance, a customer does not even have to type in his flight number but can instead simply pick the departure and the arrival airport from a list and let Flightright’s form suggest the connection he was booked on.

The systematic nature of the online form also allows the user to sign a contract directly online. This in turn eliminates the need for further correspondence and limits the time a user needs to spend to apply for compensation to 10 minutes. This seems quite convenient and provokes the question: Could it even be possibly easier to obtain compensation elsewhere?

Convenience of Flightright compared

Flightright describes itself as „the number 1 in Europe“. But what do its customers say?

On the review platform Trustpilot, the company achieves a total rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars (as of May 1, 2021). A total of more than 8,000 customers share their opinions on Flightright there. The company also collected more than 2,200 ratings on Google my Business, awarding an average of 4.7 out of five stars.

Hence, most customers appear to be highly satisfied with Flightright’s service. At the same time, only a minority of less than 10% of all commentators voices criticism. However, a comparison with competitors suggests that on a relative scale Flightright barely occupies a medium rank in the industry in terms of customer feedback.

Customer reviews of Flightright in comparison

A decision for or against Flightright depends above all on what users value individually. It is therefore advisable for every passenger to compare the offers of different flight compensation companies before choosing a specific service provider.

At least in some cases, it can be worthwhile to take a look at Flightright’s competitors: They often charge lower fees and a few companies like Refund Pilot even pay out the promised flight compensation sum faster than Flightright. Against this background, Qamqam has developed a free online tool that evaluates which air passenger rights agency offers flight compensation for specific flights and, if so, under what conditions.

Did a significant flight irregularity occur during one of your journeys? Then you are welcome to test our comparison form to see which service provider can help you most reliably to claim your compensation payment for a reasonable fee.

Alternatively, you may want to use Flightright’s compensation calculator right here.

More information on Flightright

In the following list we have compiled further interesting articles and field reports related Flightright’s compensation service.

• In one article, Stiftung Warentest discusses the path to flight compensation. Therein, the conditions of Flightright are compared with those of its competitors.
• The German travel blog Urlaubsguru took a closer look at Flightright’s selling points in this article. The authors at Urlaubsguru conclude: „If you want to insist on your passenger rights but don’t want to put yourself through the stress, Flightright or one of the other agencies is a good choice for you“.
• In another article, the German news outlet Spiegel Online deals with the history of air passenger rights companies. Using Flightright as an example, Spiegel Online shows how such service providers have enabled travellers to face airlines on an equal footing when asserting their passenger rights.
• Furthermore, the media hub Welt has compared six major German passenger rights websites. The website’s contribution assembles important information and key figures related to Flightright and other competitors.
• TripAdvisor is one of the largest German travel platforms. Here, too, you will find numerous recent reports from Flightright’s customers.

What are air passengers entitled to apart from flight compensation?

Unfortunately, only few passengers are aware that the EU Air Passenger Rights Regulation does not only oblige airlines to make lump-sum compensation payments in cases of flight irregularities.

In addition, airlines must also try to alleviate the inconvenience suffered by affected passengers in other ways.

For example, if a flight is delayed or cancelled and the transportation is postponed until the following day, the responsible carrier must pay for its passengers’ hotel accommodation. Moreover, travellers are entitled to free snacks and drinks after delays of two hours already.

Has your luggage been damaged or have you suffered other quantifiable damages? In this case, the Montreal Convention and provisions in the relevant national contract law may give rise to claims for compensation towards the airline responsible.

Qamqam has compiled what affected parties are entitled to in addition to compensation. This article provides a general overview of passenger rights in the event of flight delays. Our complete guide on the European right to compensation in the event of cancellation or delay also depicts the conditions under which a passenger is entitled to compensation under the Passenger Rights Regulation.

Further information on your rights under the EU Air Passenger Rights Regulation can also be found at the following addresses:

• In this article, Stiftung Warentest examines the question of when airlines are obliged to offer flight compensation. The article focusses on the question when airlines can rightly invoke „exceptional circumstances“ to reject a payment.
• In another article, Stiftung Warentest provides information on when affected parties can buy necessary items at the airline’s expense in the event of a delay or loss of their luggage.
• Further information on air passenger rights and your claims arising from the EU Air Passenger Rights Regulation can also be found on the website of the German Federal Aviation Authority (LBA)
• The German mobility association ADAC has also dealt with the passengers’ right to flight compensation. This article provides a solid summary.
• The Wikipedia article on air passenger rights provides a comprehensive overview of the subject.

The article was written by Simon Sturm on January 1, 2021 and updated on May 1, 2021. Mr Sturm founded the comparison website Qamqam in 2018 and has overseen its expansion since then. He also regularly contributes his own reports on Legal Tech companies like the one above.