BRUSSELS, June 12 (Reuters) – European Union countries agreed on Friday to maintain the current three-hour flight delay threshold for compensation in the EU’s next set \u200cof airline passenger rights and to ask for more price transparency on \u200cfees for carry-on items, a senior EU diplomat told reporters.<\/p>\n
The 27 member states will now send their proposal \u200bto the Parliament, which will evaluate it from Monday, the diplomat said.<\/p>\n
The European Parliament and the EU member countries had disagreed over a package of measures first put forward by the European Commission, the EU executive, more than a decade ago.<\/p>\n
The Commission had proposed to \u200craise the threshold for compensation \u2060to four hours and the member states had sought to cap the amount at \u20ac500.<\/p>\n
Under rules in place since 2004, air passengers on flights \u2060delayed by more than three hours can claim compensation from \u20ac250 up to \u20ac600, depending on the length of the flight.<\/p>\n
The member states have decided to keep the status quo on the \u200bcontentious question \u200bof compensation for delays. That issue had pitted \u200bairlines, which demanded more flexibility to \u200cremain competitive, against consumer protection associations.<\/p>\n
On the other contentious issue – the fees charged by some airlines for carry-on baggage – the member states have proposed forcing airlines to include fees for cabin bags in their basic ticket price, with the possibility of offering discounts to consumers who opt out. The measure intends to improve price transparency and comparability.<\/p>\n
Those \u200cfees have been widely criticized by consumer rights associations \u200baround the EU and sparked a political battle \u200bin 2024, when the Spanish Consumer \u200bRights Ministry fined budget airlines \u20ac179 million for charging them. The airlines \u200care appealing against the fine.<\/p>\n
The countries have \u200balso left unchanged rules \u200bthat allow an accompanying adult to sit near a child without paying a fee and that force airlines to grant more services in cases of missed \u200bconnections.<\/p>\n
They also prevented airlines from \u200cforcing passengers to download a mobile phone app to get a boarding pass, \u200ba practice Ryanair introduced in November.<\/p>\n
($1 = 0.8640 euros)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Inti Landauro; Editing \u200bby Foo Yun Chee and Edmund Klamann)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BRUSSELS, June 12 (Reuters) – European Union countries agreed on Friday to maintain the current three-hour flight delay…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2387],"tags":[34429,21650,256,258,1132,38310,38309],"class_list":["post-67967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-european-parliament","tag-airline-passenger-rights","tag-compensation","tag-european-commission","tag-european-parliament","tag-european-union-countries","tag-flight-delay","tag-price-transparency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}