Service – Get Compensation When Your Flight Is Delayed Or Cancelled

Update: They now have an annual fee option of $49 annually. I still think that is prohibitively expensive.

Service is a website that monitors your flight itineraries in your inbox for delayed or cancelled flights, specifically looking for instances where you should receive compensation from the airline. If you receive any compensation, they take 30% for their troubles otherwise their is no charge. This is actually a fairly common business model these days (e.g we also see automated price protection with Sift and car rental savings with AutoSlash).

Signing up requires connecting your e-mail account (seems to be restricted to gmail and hotmail) and giving them access to your inbox, they then search your e-mails for flight itineraries to see if you’ve been the subject of any delay or cancellation. If you are then they file a claim. It seems to be restricted to flights in Europe & USA.  When giving them access to your gmail account, they having the following privileges:

  • View and modify your mail in Gmail
  • May move mail to Spam/Trash but not instantly delete forever
  • Create, update, and delete labels
  • Compose and send new email
  • View your settings (e.g., filters and labels)

Referral Program

They offer a referral program, if you sign up using a referral link you get $20 off your first claim. The person referring you will also get $20 off their next claim. Please do not share your referral links in the comments, instead they can be shared on this post.

Downsides

  • Security/privacy. The major issue with this types of service is giving them access to your e-mail inbox. Every time you give access like this away you’re increasing your risk of your account becoming compromised.
  • Miles valuations. They charge you a 30% fee, in a lot of cases airlines will give you miles as compensation. They use The Points Guys valuations when determining the fee you pay, I personally think that TPG’s valuations are over inflated causing the fee to be realistically higher than 30%. I’d say that a more conservative valuation of 1¢ per mile is fair in this instance.

Our Verdict

If I’m eligible for compensation under EU Regulation 261/2004, then I definitely want to do it myself as the compensation is €250 to €600. Personally I think a fee of up to €180 for filing that claim is excessive. It doesn’t seem like there is any way to choose when they do/don’t file a complaint (I guess this would defeat the purpose as people would just select no after they found the option) so I won’t be using this service. I guess if you normally wouldn’t do this yourself then it’s kind of a no lose situation (apart from the significant security/privacy concerns). If anybody has used the service successfully or unsuccessfully I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Hat tip to Wolfe1 as that’s where I originally heard of this

 

 

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Lindsy
Lindsy (@guest_541381)
December 26, 2017 04:42

My parents travelled three mounth ago from Lisbon to Dublin on Luftansa. Their flight was delayed 4h without no explanation, no food provided diabetic and senior people standing up for all this hours no support or any effort from them some people like my dad was felling not well because age/ diabetic was reported and none cares about it. I was shocked by this. We decided to seek help from the company, because we realized that it would be difficult to obtain compensation from the airline for the inconvenience. It’s good that my husband already had a similar experience. He had previously applied to one service called AirAdvisor. And they helped him. Therefore, we did the same. Filled out the form on their website (airadvisor(.)com if someone is interested), and a month later the parents were returned money. I was glad that they answered for their negligence in full.

wesz
wesz (@guest_534075)
December 11, 2017 22:10

does any one know how to do it yourself?

Curmudgeon
Curmudgeon (@guest_527136)
November 30, 2017 00:01

I think to avoid the security concerns with this, I’d set up a new email account just for airline related email, then set it to auto-forward everything to your regular email address.

That would allow theses companies access to what you want to give them, but keep them from prying into your other emails. If the airline email gets compromised it would be pretty easy to close it down, start a new one and update that with the airline.

A Stad
A Stad (@guest_526946)
November 29, 2017 18:20

I used this service once – I made a claim, and they marked it as “resolved” without any actual reasoning or evidence, or even compensation.. and all of my messages to support were ignored. Left a bad taste in my mouth.

Chucks
Chucks (@guest_526866)
November 29, 2017 16:38

“I’d say that a more conservative valuation of 1¢ per mile is fair in this instance.”

That’s a pretty dismal valuation of anything but Skypesos.

Southwest and JetBlue can be redeemed on almost any flight for much more than one cent.

Not hard to find United fares in the 1.5 level. AA is a bit tougher depending on where you’re going. TPG is a little inflated, but 1 cpm is low.

Alex
Alex (@guest_526785)
November 29, 2017 14:39

A similar competitor to this is called AirHelp (https://www.airhelp.com/). I used them for an EU 261 compensation issue last year and it worked out really well.

I don’t believe AirHelp requires access to your email account, either (although it is a feature they offer). They certainly didn’t when I used them.

Jeremiah
Jeremiah (@guest_526746)
November 29, 2017 13:31

A) Giving them full access to my email box is too much.

B) The service is expensive, especially considering the miles valuation.

But most of all:

If this kind of thing gets widespread enough, airlines will tighten up their rules for courtesy compensation. Obviously that doesn’t apply to legally mandated compensation, but if even 5% of the flying public starts using a service like that I can’t imagine that airlines will continue with their current internal policies for delay compensation upon request.

See how Amazon stopped doing price matching after services like Paribus automated the process…

Very excited for this service to do the same thing for another industry.

Kevin
Kevin (@guest_526849)
November 29, 2017 16:16

Another thing airlines will do is just increase the flight duration. Since the EU mandate, flight times have gone up, not because it actually takes longer to fly there, but because the airline has a larger time window they need to meet at less cost.

Philip DiStefano
Philip DiStefano (@guest_526728)
November 29, 2017 13:10

I would never sign up for this. Giving a third party access to your email, unless you have a separate email account for airline receipts, is absolutely crazy.

Rd
Rd (@guest_526727)
November 29, 2017 13:07

Giving them access to my inbox is a deal breaker. Why don’t they make it so that I can just forward my itenarary to them?

Kyle
Kyle (@guest_526739)
November 29, 2017 13:25
  Rd

Agreed. I understand they want to make it fully hands-off automated, but access to all of your inbox is overstepping the boundary.

Josh
Josh (@guest_526752)
November 29, 2017 13:47
  Rd

Probably because part of their business model is to harvest data from your other emails as well, that’s my guess anyway.

Chris
Chris (@guest_526759)
November 29, 2017 14:02

Or maybe they need to interact with the airline from your email account. In any case, an easy way around it is to create an email account for flight confirmations

Chucks
Chucks (@guest_526863)
November 29, 2017 16:36
  Rd

How would they know you’ve gotten compensation?

Gaurav
Gaurav (@guest_526725)
November 29, 2017 13:06

I received an email from Rakuten Slice yesterday offering to monitor purchases via your email and retrieve money for a 25% commission. Interesting new area.

MZ
MZ (@guest_526730)
November 29, 2017 13:10

Another one of those is called Earny. But they all ask for your email access…
Probably a good idea to get a new email for all those order confirmations (and junks). Definitely don’t want them to be able to access my egc’s.

Abey
Abey (@guest_526856)
November 29, 2017 16:25
  MZ

Ye. I have earny. I did get $11 once from them.