The Commission first proposed updating EU Regulation 261/2004 in June 2013. That same summer, Edward Snowden was making headlines from a Moscow airport transit zone, Daft Punk were at number one across Europe, and the iPhone 5 was the phone people had in their pockets when their flights were delayed. The regulation that governed those delays — what airlines owed passengers, how long they had to wait before compensation kicked in, what counted as an excuse — had been law since February 2005. The update was overdue.
Thirteen years later, the negotiation is still going. This week, Parliament and Council will attempt again — reportedly at least the fourth round of serious trilogue talks — to find text that both institutions can live with. The December 2025 round collapsed. Renew Europe’s shadow rapporteur Jan-Christoph Oetjen walked out of that session and said publicly that “the Council proved unwilling to compromise on any points.” The Polish presidency has put a deal on the agenda for the week of June 1. What exactly they expect to achieve is not entirely clear.
What EC 261/2004 actually does, and why it needs updating
The existing regulation was built around a simple premise: if your flight is delayed, cancelled, or overbooked, and the airline is responsible, you are owed something. The something is tiered by flight distance. Under 1,500 kilometres: €250. Between 1,500 and 3,500 kilometres: €400. Anything longer: €600. The compensation kicks in when a delay exceeds three hours at the destination. The airline can avoid paying if it can demonstrate “extraordinary circumstances” — things like severe weather, air traffic control strikes, or security threats that were genuinely outside its control.
That structure has generated decades of litigation. The Court of Justice of the EU’s 2009 Sturgeon ruling extended compensation rights to passengers delayed by three hours or more, even when their flight technically departed — a decision that the airline industry has never fully accepted and that led to years of national courts applying the rule inconsistently. IATA, in an opinion piece published in October last year, described EU261 as a regulation whose “original intention has been subverted by various legal rulings” and called the Parliament’s reform proposals “a misguided wish-list.” The body counted over 80 legal amendments to the original regulation across member state case law.
There are also genuine gaps in the current text. It does not adequately address connecting flights — specifically, what happens when you miss a connection because the first leg was delayed and the two legs were booked separately. It says very little about what happens when an airline goes insolvent while you are holding a ticket. The definition of “extraordinary circumstances” has been interpreted so broadly by some airlines, and so narrowly by courts, that no consistent standard exists across the EU.
In 2024 alone, more than 287 million passengers across Europe were affected by delays or cancellations. The regulation that governs what they are owed has not been substantively updated since the same year Facebook launched.
The three-hour question
The core fight, the one that broke December’s talks, is whether the delay threshold for compensation should stay at three hours or move to four.
The Council’s position — endorsed by a political agreement among member states on June 5, 2025 — is that the threshold should be raised to four hours for short-haul flights and nine hours for long-haul. The Council also wants to cap the maximum compensation payment at a flat €300, regardless of flight distance. Under the current rules, a long-haul passenger delayed by more than three hours is owed €600. Under the Council’s proposal, they would receive €300 — half the current amount — and would have to wait an additional hour before any obligation arose.
The Parliament’s position goes in the opposite direction. It voted in October 2025 to keep the three-hour threshold intact, raise the minimum compensation for short flights from €250 to €300, index all compensation amounts to inflation every three years, and add a set of new consumer protections: free carry-on luggage included in the base ticket price, a ban on fees for name corrections, guaranteed airport tax refunds for passengers who cancel voluntarily, and a prohibition on airlines cancelling the return leg of a journey because the outbound was missed.
IATA described the Parliament’s package as adding “protections, complications, and costs” that “Europe cannot afford.” The airline industry’s argument is essentially that EU261 already makes European aviation more expensive and operationally more constrained than airlines elsewhere, and that raising obligations further without addressing the extraordinary circumstances loophole abuses first is putting the cart before the horse.
The passenger advocacy side — and several MEPs have been explicit about this — argues that the Council’s position would make enforcement practically useless. Aviation.Direct reported that in Germany, the cost of pursuing a compensation claim in court typically runs between €470 and €780. If the maximum claim value is capped at €300, the rational decision for most passengers is to drop it. A regulation that is technically in force but practically unenforceable because the amount at stake is lower than the cost of enforcing it is not a protection — it is paperwork.
The connecting flights problem
The second major battleground is connecting flights, and it is more technically complicated than the compensation threshold.
Under the current regulation, your rights depend almost entirely on how your journey was booked. If you bought a single through-ticket — one booking reference covering both legs — the airline is responsible for getting you to your final destination, and if a delay on the first leg causes you to miss the connection, it owes you care, re-routing, and potentially compensation. If you bought the two legs separately — on different booking references, even from the same airline — you are largely on your own once you miss the connection. The delay on the first flight might entitle you to compensation for that leg, but the missed connection is your problem.
This distinction made more sense when two separately booked flights were genuinely independent journeys. It makes less sense now, when online booking tools routinely show passengers itineraries that combine flights from different carriers across separate tickets because it is cheaper, without adequately communicating that the combination carries significantly reduced protection. The Parliament’s proposal introduced protections for “self-connections” — itineraries where both legs were booked through the same platform even if the tickets are separate — recognising that the practical experience of the passenger does not map onto the legal formalism of the booking reference.
The Council’s position on self-connections is more limited. The gap between the two texts here is not principally ideological; it is about liability and who pays when the platform, rather than the airline, assembled the itinerary. The travel industry, including online booking intermediaries, has lobbied hard on this point. Business Travel News Europe reported in November that GBTA, BT4Europe, and the VDR — the main corporate travel representative bodies — were lobbying against Parliament’s proposal on intermediary liability, on the grounds that obliging intermediaries to cover compensation would push up fees for all users.
Airline insolvency: the Flyr problem, and others
The third pressure point is what happens when an airline ceases operations while passengers hold valid tickets.
This is not a hypothetical. Norwegian budget carrier Flyr collapsed in February 2023. FlyBMI, Flybe, and Primera Air all folded in the previous decade. Each time, passengers holding tickets discovered that EU261 — which requires compensation from the “operating air carrier” — offers very little if the carrier no longer exists. The Package Travel Directive provides stronger insolvency protection, but only for package holidays; a seat-only booking on a failed carrier is effectively an unsecured creditor claim.
The Commission’s 2013 proposal addressed this. The Parliament’s position addresses it. The Council’s position is more cautious, because the member states are the ones who would ultimately backstop any insolvency protection scheme, and there is no political consensus on what that backstop should look like. This is where the technical difficulty of the file meets a genuine disagreement about whether passenger protection from airline insolvency is primarily an EU-level responsibility or a national one.
Why it has taken thirteen years
The file was opened in 2013. The Commission’s original proposal was then sitting in the Council for two years before discussions even began in earnest. The European Parliament adopted its first reading position in 2014. The Council finally reached its general approach in February 2016 — three years after the proposal. Then nothing happened for years. Brexit negotiations consumed political oxygen. COVID-19 hit, which both demonstrated why the regulation mattered and gave airlines a strong political argument that they could not absorb additional obligations while the industry was losing billions. When the industry recovered, the cost-of-living crisis gave a different argument for holding off on measures that might push up ticket prices.
The current negotiating positions were developed in 2025. The Council reached its political agreement in June of that year; the Parliament adopted its plenary position in October. December’s trilogue failed. The Polish presidency, which holds the Council chair until June 30, has made the file a priority for its remaining weeks. If it does not close before July, Denmark takes over, and the Danish presidency inherits the dossier — along with its history of near-misses.
There is a version of this negotiation where the three-hour threshold is the price Parliament pays for better self-connection rules and a workable insolvency protection mechanism. There is another version where Parliament holds the three-hour line and the Council drops the flat-rate compensation cap in exchange for limiting the carry-on luggage provisions. The art of a trilogue is finding the package both sides can take home and call a win.
What is clear is that the current regulation — written when Ryanair was growing and easyJet was still a novelty, before smartphone booking was ubiquitous, before the pandemic, before the wave of airline insolvencies that followed — is running on borrowed time. Whether this week produces the deal or just another progress report is, for 287 million affected passengers a year, not an abstract question.
Sources:
Council of the EU, political agreement on EU261 revision (June 5, 2025), https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2025/06/05/council-sets-position-on-clearer-and-improved-rules-for-air-passengers/;
European Parliament Legislative Train, file 2013/0072(COD), https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/spotlight-JD22/file-common-rules-on-compensation-to-passengers;
Renew Europe, statement on December 2025 trilogue deadlock (December 2, 2025), https://www.reneweuropegroup.eu/news/2025-12-02/renew-europe-will-fight-to-defend-air-passenger-rights-despite-lack-of-agreement-in-trilogues;
IATA opinion, “Europe Can’t Afford the European Parliament’s Gold-Plated Wish-List for EU261” (October 2025), https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/opinions/europe-cant-afford-the-european-parliaments-gold-plated-wish-list-for-eu261;
Aviation.Direct, “EU261 reform: Member States grant mandate for negotiations” (March 2026), https://aviation.direct/en/debatte-um-die-reform-der-eu-fluggastrechte-mitgliedstaaten-erteilen-mandat-fuer-verhandlungen-ueber-die-verordnung-eg-261;
Flight-delayed.com, “European Parliament and Council Clash Over Air Passenger Rights Reform” (October 2025), https://www.flight-delayed.com/en/news/2025/10/15/european-parliament-council-clash-air-passenger-rights-reform
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