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Last week, I received a surprise email from TripIt about a possible compensation I may be owed for a flight I took back in October 2015! The email title read “SWISS may owe you $467.00 for your disrupted flight to Montreal”. It had my complete attention.
TripIt and AirHelp partnership for flight compensation
TripIt is my favourite travel app that helps with organizing and managing my trips. Now, TripIt has partnered with AirHelp (TripIt Pro feature) to help clients claim flight compensations that they maybe eligible for.
AirHelp is a service that specializes in helping air passengers get compensation for delayed, canceled, and overbooked flights. While it does not “cost” anything to submit a claim, AirHelp does take a chunky cut as service fee. AirHelp does not charge any Service Fee unless your claim is successful.
As part of the TripIt and AirHelp partnership, TripIt scanned my trips to and from Europe, from last three years to see if I qualified for any compensations. Seems like they did find a flight from Zurich to Montreal that was delayed by more than 3 hours, ‘without any reason provided’. My flight was eligible for compensation under EU Reg. 261/2004, which protects passengers against lengthy delays and other travel disruptions.
Claim Eligible segment: Zurich – Montreal, delayed by 3+ hours
Compensation for ZRH – YUL segment delay, with 35% AirHelp service fee
Submitting my claim was easy, the link provided in email directed me to the AirHelp dashboard which had imported trip details from TripIt already – very efficient. I verified a few details and submitted my claim through AirHelp, it would be interesting to see what comes of it.
Take Away
This is a great service add on by TripIt for its ‘Pro’ members. I like to keep on top of all my claims and am normally diligent in calling out the airlines on anything that warrants a compensation. While I won’t proactively use AirHelp to claim compensation, if TripIt wants to alert me of situations where I could be eligible, I couldn’t be happier. Unlike me, if you couldn’t be bothered with spending hours to claim what is owed to you, AirHelp can be a great service and the new partnership with TripIt is a great initiative.
9 comments
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Hmmm, although I know that airlines get away with a lot of ‘anti-customer’ practices, I don’t like this ‘trip compensation’ thing. Of course I do NOT mean the right to be treated fairly by an airline, but the setting of this specific ‘compensation’ as described in this article. It smells too much of ambulance chasers. For me it paints the image of lawsuit lawyers looking for yet another niche to plunder, and I’d be darned if I allow uncallous greediness to use me as a tool, accessing my travel data, measuring any flight delay down to the second as well as any cancellation in the hope to get their fingers in the airlines business cookie jar. Any mail I’d get that said “such and such may owe you so much” would raise a big red flag without even reading further. It sounds awfully familiar to an action class lawsuit letter. Besides, we know what happens when a business sector ‘loses’ a lot of money to litigation lawyers, right? Exactly, prices go up. Thanks but no thanks.
I agree. As I mentioned in the blog, I would never use any service to claim compensation as such but proceeded with this as a test-run/data point. I don’t mind tripit scanning my trips and send me alerts though, I am not obliged to use their service to claim. Once I get the notification, I can look into it and proceed myself. Airhelp is not alone in that space, several other services out there – I liked your ambulance chasers analogy 🙂
I appreciate the EU flight delay compensation rules. However, I don’t think the process is that difficult to just address directly with the airline. I’m not paying some middleman a $250 cut from the compensation owed. Just email SWISS directly with the claim.
Yep, i would notmally donit myself too. This one is a test run to see how the tripit/airhelp partnership works. Also this was a bit of a “welcome surprise” from a flight taken in 2015!
I got this spam message too from TripIt. Although I opted out for commercial messages form third parties. What does flying get better or cheaper than only this claim farms? His claims must stop
This is def not spam. Are you implying that flying gets more expensive because of consumer claims? What about passenger rights? When passengers are not given whats due to them, does flying get cheaper?
Yes iT is. Why should an airline pay 250€ When you only paid €24 for an Ryan air ticket for example? That is nonsense. I agree with rights. But these air help companies, or claim forms charge 30% and only the easy low hanging fruit. They are not here for your rights. They are here for the big money
Absolutely, airhelp and others are just like any other company, looking to make a buck.