Separate tickets: who is liable when you miss your own connection?

EU261 is built around individual flights. The scope in Article 3(1) starts from where the flight departs and which carrier operates it, and Article 2(b) defines an "operating air carrier" as an air carrier that performs or intends to perform a flight under a contract with a passenger. A claim is therefore directed at the carrier that operated the flight affected.

What decides how much delay counts is the definition in Article 2(h). Final destination means the destination on the ticket presented at the check-in counter or, in the case of directly connecting flights, the destination of the last flight. If you hold two tickets, the ticket you check in on ends at the transfer airport. That is the point the delay is measured to, wherever you were actually heading.

The Commission's Interpretative Guidelines on the Regulation say so explicitly in section 4.4.2: if passengers have two separate tickets for two consecutive flights and delay of the first flight means that they are unable to check in on time for the following flight, air carriers are not obliged to pay compensation. The same section adds that passengers may still be entitled to compensation from the carrier operating the first flight if that flight itself is subject to a long delay (see below). The Guidelines are the Commission's interpretation and do not bind the courts, but they show how the framework is meant to be read. We have not found any ruling of the Court of Justice of the EU that addresses the question of separate tickets directly; the conclusion rests on the Regulation's scope, on the definition of final destination and on the Guidelines.

The dividing line shows up most clearly in the cases where the whole journey sat in a single booking. In Case C-502/18, CS and Others v České aerolinie (Ninth Chamber, 11 July 2019), eleven passengers held a single booking Prague–Abu Dhabi–Bangkok. The first leg was flown on time by České aerolinie, while the second was operated by Etihad Airways under a code-share agreement and arrived 488 minutes late. The Court held that a journey with connecting flights covered by a single reservation constitutes a whole, and that the passengers could direct their claim at the EU carrier that had concluded the contract of carriage with them and operated the first flight, even though the delay arose on a leg that carrier did not fly.

Case C-436/21, flightright v American Airlines (Eighth Chamber, 6 October 2022), goes a step further. A travel agency had combined Stuttgart–Zurich–Philadelphia–Kansas City, charged an overall price and issued a single ticket, with the flights operated by carriers that had no specific legal relationship with one another. The Court interpreted Article 2(h) as meaning that this was nevertheless a connecting flight, and that a passenger departing from an airport in the EU who arrives with a long delay at the destination of the last flight may rely on the right to compensation under Article 7.

What was decisive, then, was not whether the carriers co-operated. It was that a travel agency had put the journey together, charged an overall price and issued a single ticket. A so-called self-transfer, where a booking platform combines two departures but sells them as two tickets with two booking references, is therefore likely to fall on the other side of that dividing line. So check your booking confirmation before you assume anything: one ticket number and one overall price point towards a connecting flight, two booking references towards two journeys.