If your Transavia 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 flightTransavia is licensed in the Netherlands and is part of the Air France-KLM group, which makes it an EU carrier. You are covered on Transavia flights into the EU from anywhere in the world, as well as on everything leaving it.
It flies leisure routes out of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Eindhoven, and there is a separate French operation based in Paris. Compensation is unaffected by what you paid for the seat.
The amount is set by the straight-line distance from where you departed to your final destination. These are real distances on routes Transavia flies:
| Example route | Distance | If delayed 3h+ |
|---|---|---|
| Amsterdam to Barcelona | 1,241 km | €250 |
| Amsterdam to Malaga | 1,884 km | €400 |
| Amsterdam to Tenerife | 3,224 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 thing specific to Transavia: the Dutch and French operations hold separate licences and operate as separate airlines. If you booked through one and flew on the other, the claim lies against whichever one actually operated the aircraft. Check the flight number rather than the website you booked on, because a claim sent to the wrong entity comes back as “not our booking” and a lot of people read that as a refusal.
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 Transavia'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 Transavia 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 Transavia flight is very often still claimable.
Check your Transavia flight