If your LOT 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 flightLOT is licensed in Poland, which makes it an EU carrier. You are covered on LOT flights into the EU from anywhere in the world as well as on departures from it, which brings its North American and Asian routes into scope in both directions.
Compensation is set by law and has nothing to do with the fare you paid.
The amount is set by the straight-line distance from where you departed to your final destination. These are real distances on routes LOT flies:
| Example route | Distance | If delayed 3h+ |
|---|---|---|
| Warsaw to Paris | 1,343 km | €250 |
| Warsaw to London | 1,469 km | €250 |
| Warsaw to New York | 6,848 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.
Warsaw to London is 1,469 km, which lands 31 km under the 1,500 km threshold. That is the difference between €250 and €400 on a route plenty of people fly, and it is a good illustration of why the band is worth checking rather than assuming.
LOT runs Warsaw as a connecting hub between Europe and North America, so missed connections are common. If both legs were on one booking, your compensation is worked out on when you reached your final destination, not on the delay to the first leg.
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 LOT'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 LOT 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 LOT flight is very often still claimable.
Check your LOT flight