If your Aegean flight was delayed three hours or more, cancelled at short notice, or overbooked, you may be owed a fixed cash payment set by law. Here is where you stand with them specifically.
Check your flightAegean is licensed in Greece, which makes it an EU carrier. You are covered on Aegean flights into the EU from anywhere in the world as well as on everything leaving it.
It operates out of Athens and Thessaloniki, with a dense network of domestic island routes alongside the international ones. Compensation takes no account of your fare.
The amount is set by the straight-line distance from where you departed to your final destination. These are real distances on routes Aegean flies:
| Example route | Distance | If delayed 3h+ |
|---|---|---|
| Athens to Santorini | 218 km | €250 |
| Athens to Paris | 2,109 km | €400 |
| Athens to London | 2,426 km | €400 |
A delay pays at three hours or more, measured by when the aircraft door opened at your destination rather than when you took off.
Look at the first row again. Athens to Santorini is a 218 km hop lasting about 45 minutes, and a three hour delay on it pays €250, which is several times what most people pay for the ticket.
There is no minimum distance in the regulation and no rule reducing compensation on short flights. Domestic island routes are where this is most often missed, because a delay on a 45 minute flight does not feel like the kind of thing that pays. It pays exactly the same as a three hour delay on a flight to Paris.
An airline only escapes paying if the cause was an extraordinary circumstance outside its control. Bad weather, air traffic control restrictions, airport strikes, security alerts and bird strikes all qualify, and genuinely do defeat a claim.
These do not qualify, whatever you are told at the desk: a technical or mechanical fault with the aircraft, a strike by Aegean's own pilots or cabin crew, a missing crew member, and a knock-on delay because the aircraft arrived late from an earlier flight. Courts have ruled on all four.
If Aegean gave you no reason at all, claim anyway. The burden of proof is on the airline. They must prove the cause was extraordinary. You do not have to prove it was not.
Write to them directly first, and keep it to one short email: your booking reference, the flight number and date, how late you arrived at your final destination, and the sentence “I am claiming compensation under Regulation EC 261/2004.” Give them 14 days to respond.
If they refuse or ignore you, escalate free of charge to the national enforcement body in the country you departed from. In the UK that is the Civil Aviation Authority; every EU state has an equivalent regulator. Escalating costs nothing.
You usually have years, not months, to do this. The UK allows 6 years, France and Spain 5, Germany 3, and Italy and the Netherlands 2. An old Aegean flight is very often still claimable.
Check your Aegean flight