Operational Headaches Aren’t “Extraordinary”: Dutch Court Narrows Airline Defence Against Compensation Claims

The Bottom Line

• Airlines cannot use knock-on operational issues, such as a future flight violating an airport curfew, as an extraordinary circumstance to deny compensation for a current flight’s cancellation.
• Internal commercial or operational decisions, even if made to prevent wider network disruption, do not shield an airline from its obligations to passengers under EU Regulation 261/2004.
• This ruling reinforces that the direct cause for cancellation must be an external, unavoidable event affecting the specific flight in question, not a self-imposed choice to protect a subsequent leg of the journey.

The Details

The case involved a passenger whose EasyJet flight from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport to Copenhagen was cancelled. As is standard practice, the passenger filed a claim for €250 in compensation under EU Regulation 261/2004, which mandates payment for significant delays or cancellations. The airline refused to pay, arguing that the cancellation was the result of extraordinary circumstances, a defence that, if successful, would absolve it of liability.

EasyJet’s defence hinged on a domino effect. The airline argued that the flight to Copenhagen had incurred a delay. This initial delay meant that the subsequent return flight from Copenhagen back to Amsterdam would have landed after the mandatory night-time closure of Schiphol Airport. To avoid violating this curfew with the return flight, EasyJet made the decision to pre-emptively cancel the outbound flight from Amsterdam altogether, positioning this as an unavoidable consequence of the airport’s operational restrictions.

The District Court of Noord-Holland flatly rejected this argument. The judge’s reasoning was sharp and direct: the Schiphol night curfew affected the return flight, not the passenger’s original flight from Amsterdam to Copenhagen. The court determined that the cancellation was not caused by an uncontrollable external event but was rather an internal, operational choice made by the airline to manage its own schedule. While this decision may have made business sense for EasyJet, it does not meet the legal standard for an extraordinary circumstance. The airline chose to sacrifice one flight for the sake of another, and it must therefore compensate the passengers it disadvantaged.

Source

Source: Rechtbank Noord-Holland