Malta Air flight delay and cancellation compensation

Malta Air flight delay and cancellation: your rights

Malta Air holds a Maltese operating licence and flies a large part of the Ryanair group's network, including much of its Italian and German-based flying. The booking often carries a Ryanair code; the operating certificate is Maltese, and that decides both your rights and who you write to.

As an EU carrier, EU261 reaches its flights fully:

• Departing any EU or EEA airport — covered.
• Arriving into the EU or EEA from outside it — covered, because the licence is Maltese.
• Departing or arriving in the UK — UK261 applies instead, in sterling.

The claim goes to the operator

The regulation puts the duty on the operating carrier, and in this group that is frequently not the airline named on the ticket. A letter to Ryanair about a Malta Air flight is a letter that gets forwarded, and forwarding costs weeks.

Read the operator off your boarding pass and name it, with the flight number and date, in your first line. Our claim letter guide covers what else belongs there.

What a Malta Air claim is worth

Distance sets the amount, and the ticket price has nothing to do with it:

• €250 for routes of 1,500 km or less
• €400 for intra-EU routes over 1,500 km, and any route between 1,500 and 3,500 km
• €600 beyond 3,500 km

Every passenger on the booking is owed the full figure separately. The triggers are a three-hour arrival delay at your final destination, a cancellation with less than fourteen days' notice, or denied boarding on an oversold flight.

Extraordinary circumstances

Low-cost carriers refuse a high proportion of claims by calling the cause extraordinary. That answers only half the legal test: the airline must also show that no reasonable measure would have avoided the disruption, and most refusal letters never mention the second half.

A technical fault found in maintenance is not extraordinary, and neither is a crew shortage. Our guide to extraordinary circumstances sets out what the courts have accepted and how to answer a refusal.

How to claim Malta Air flight delay compensation

Start with the flight itself. Our free flight check reads the recorded departure and arrival times for your Malta Air flight and tells you which band it falls in, in about two minutes.

A Malta Air compensation claim turns on the arrival time and on the reason the airline gives, so read both before you write. The flight delay compensation guide sets out the bands, and the cancellation compensation guide covers Malta Air cancellation compensation for a flight that never operated. If the airline refuses, the case law summary sets out what the courts have accepted as an excuse and what they have thrown out.