If your Finnair 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 flightFinnair is licensed in Finland, which makes it an EU carrier. You are covered on Finnair flights into the EU from anywhere in the world, including the long haul routes from Asia, as well as on everything leaving Europe.
Compensation is fixed by law and takes no account of your fare, so an economy seat and a business seat on the same delayed flight are owed the same amount.
The amount is set by the straight-line distance from where you departed to your final destination. These are real distances on routes Finnair flies:
| Example route | Distance | If delayed 3h+ |
|---|---|---|
| Helsinki to Berlin | 1,128 km | €250 |
| Helsinki to London | 1,848 km | €400 |
| Helsinki to Tokyo | 7,824 km | €600 |
A delay pays at three hours or more, measured by when the aircraft door opened at your destination rather than when you took off.
A nuance that matters on Finnair specifically. Its Asian routes now fly considerably longer than they used to, because the airspace they previously crossed is closed to them. That adds hours to the flight but it does not change your compensation band.
Article 7 measures distance by the great circle route between your departure airport and your final destination, which is the straight line over the globe. How far the aircraft actually flew is irrelevant. A longer routing does not move you up a band, and it is not in itself a reason for the airline to refuse.
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 Finnair'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 Finnair 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 Finnair flight is very often still claimable.
Check your Finnair flight