If your Pegasus 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 flightThis is the one airline on this site where the direction of travel decides everything, so it is worth reading carefully.
Pegasus is a Turkish carrier, and Turkey is outside the EU and UK. That means you are covered on Pegasus flights departing an EU or UK airport, because the departure airport brings any airline into scope. You are not covered on the return leg from Turkey, because a flight into Europe from a third country is only covered when an EU or UK carrier operates it.
So on the same return booking, the outbound is claimable and the inbound is not.
The amount is set by the straight-line distance from where you departed to your final destination. These are real distances on routes Pegasus flies:
| Example route | Distance | If delayed 3h+ |
|---|---|---|
| London Stansted to Istanbul | 2,518 km | £350 |
| Berlin to Istanbul | 1,748 km | €400 |
| Amsterdam to Istanbul | 2,246 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.
Notice the currencies in that table. The London departure falls under UK261 and pays in pounds, while the Berlin and Amsterdam departures fall under EU261 and pay in euro. The departure airport decides the scheme, not the airline.
If your delay was on the way home from Istanbul, EU261 gives you nothing, and anyone telling you otherwise has not checked. What you may still have is a claim under the Montreal Convention for proven financial loss caused by the delay, which is a different and harder claim, and a written complaint deadline of 21 days for baggage problems.
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 Pegasus'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 Pegasus 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 Pegasus flight is very often still claimable.
Check your Pegasus flight