For most of the last twenty years, the rules have been clear: if your flight is delayed by more than three hours, you are entitled to compensation. The amount — between €250 and €600 depending on distance — is fixed. It has shaped how airlines price risk, how passengers travel, and how claims management companies have built entire businesses.
That clarity is now at risk. A conciliation committee is working through what may be the last realistic chance to update EU air passenger rights rules before the current framework either collapses or gets locked in for another decade. The talks are not going well.
The European Commission proposed updating Regulation 261/2004 — the law that established the current compensation framework — years ago. What nobody anticipated was that any revision would prove this contentious, or take this long.
The core disagreement is arithmetically simple but politically explosive. The European Parliament wants to keep the 3-hour threshold for compensation entitlement. The Council — representing member state governments — wants to raise it. The Council's various proposals have ranged from four to six hours. Even the lower end of that range would disqualify most delays that currently trigger payouts.
The Parliament's position is not a compromise — it is a line in the sand. On 21 January, MEPs voted 632 to 15 to maintain the existing threshold and strengthen passenger protections further. That is not the kind of majority that leaves room for a deal in the middle.
The 90-minute gap between the Parliament's position (3 hours) and the Council's softer proposals (from 4 to 6 hours) does not sound like much. In practice, it determines whether 80 to 85 percent of passengers currently entitled to compensation can still claim it under any revised rules.
Short-haul delays — the most common type — cluster heavily between three and five hours. These are delays caused by crew unavailability, technical faults, late-arriving aircraft, and airport congestion. They are exactly what the compensation framework was designed to address. Raise the trigger to four or five hours, and most of these delays fall below the line.
Airlines have lobbied consistently for the change, arguing the current rules create financial unpredictability and inflate ticket prices. Consumer groups counter that the threshold already reflects the reality of short-haul travel: a three-hour delay on a two-hour flight is, from the passenger's perspective, functionally the same as the flight not operating at all.
Conciliation is EU law's last-chance mechanism — when Parliament and Council cannot agree through the normal trilogue process, negotiators from both sides meet in a formal committee with a fixed deadline. If no deal is reached, the legislative process fails, and the existing regulation stays in force.
That failure scenario is, paradoxically, what passenger rights advocates are counting on. If conciliation collapses, passengers retain the protections they currently have. A deal — particularly one that accepts any version of the Council's raised threshold — would lock in a weaker regime that airlines and member states have spent years lobbying for.
Talks are reported to be deadlocked over the compensation threshold and over new rules for cancellations. Neither side has signalled movement on the headline number. The June deadline is now the defining pressure point.
This is one of those EU negotiations where the worst outcome for consumers is a deal, not a breakdown. If conciliation fails, the stronger existing rules survive intact. If it succeeds on the Council's terms, most passengers with valid claims today lose that right tomorrow. The June deadline is worth watching closely — in this case, failure is a win for passengers.
