If your airBaltic 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 flightairBaltic is licensed in Latvia, which makes it an EU carrier. You are covered on its flights into the EU from anywhere in the world as well as on everything departing it.
It operates out of Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius, and compensation is unaffected by what the ticket cost you.
The amount is set by the straight-line distance from where you departed to your final destination. These are real distances on routes airBaltic flies:
| Example route | Distance | If delayed 3h+ |
|---|---|---|
| Riga to Berlin | 841 km | €250 |
| Riga to London | 1,689 km | €400 |
| Riga to Malaga | 3,082 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.
One quirk worth knowing. airBaltic leases aircraft and crew to other airlines, so a flight sold to you by a completely different carrier may have been flown by airBaltic. Compensation is always owed by the operating carrier, meaning whoever actually flew the aircraft.
If your boarding pass says one airline and the aircraft said airBaltic, the claim goes to airBaltic. This catches people out regularly, and a rejection on the grounds that it was not their flight is usually correct and simply sent to the wrong company.
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 airBaltic'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 airBaltic 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 airBaltic flight is very often still claimable.
Check your airBaltic flight