This App Makes Airlines Pay You When Your Flight is Delayed
Raise your hand if you can relate…
AirHelp is a website and app that wants to help passengers cash in on claims that go unclaimed almost all of the time. With a crazy delayed flight out of Singapore, no help from the airline help desk and hours to burn, Henrik Zillmer started doing research. He discovered that — hey! you can claim up to $825 (€600, in his case) if your flight is delayed for more than three hours. And while there are about 26 million passengers eligible to cash in on similar issues every year, only about 2% actually file.
If you have ever tried to navigate the terrible world of claiming whatever it might be that an airline owes you — a free flight, bonus miles, an extra bag of peanuts — you’ve probably been met with the same headaches Zillmer and his team did when they tried it. We’re sorry for their stress but happy that it pushed them to found AirHelp, a service that makes the process simple for the millions of passengers owed money. Their solution? They do the dirty work for you.
Instead of going to the airline, you share the issue with AirHelp who fights for your compensation and takes a 25% fee. This brings us to the bad [for some of us] news. AirHelp is fighting for European Union passenger rights, so they can only help out fliers leaving the EU on an airline or arriving in the EU with a carrier registered in the EU. (Remember how we said we were obsessed with Europe these days? Add “EU passenger rights” to the list of reasons why.)
Consider this our official campaign to get AirHelp to help the air over here too. What they do reminds us of Fixed, a handy, helpful San Francisco-based app that takes your parking tickets to court for you. A web-based service that helps you file claims or fight for what’s right is one we want to download for all areas of our life, thank you.
Would you use AirHelp to help you cash in on a European flight gone bad? What would you use a similar app or site for?
