If your Icelandair 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 flightIceland is in the European Economic Area and EU261 applies there in full, so Icelandair is treated as an EU carrier for compensation purposes. You are covered leaving Keflavik, and also on Icelandair flights into Europe from North America.
People often assume Iceland sits outside the scheme because it is not an EU member state. It does not. The regulation covers Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland alongside the EU proper.
The amount is set by the straight-line distance from where you departed to your final destination. These are real distances on routes Icelandair flies:
| Example route | Distance | If delayed 3h+ |
|---|---|---|
| Keflavik to London | 1,895 km | €400 |
| Keflavik to Copenhagen | 2,144 km | €400 |
| Keflavik to New York | 4,163 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.
Icelandair is built around stopping over at Keflavik between Europe and North America, which makes missed connections the most common problem on it. The rule that matters is this: if both legs were on one booking, compensation is calculated on your arrival at the final destination, not at Keflavik.
So a short delay leaving Europe that causes you to miss the onward flight and land in North America eleven hours late is a €600 claim, even though the delay on the first leg was well under three hours.
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 Icelandair'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 Icelandair 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 Icelandair flight is very often still claimable.
Check your Icelandair flight