20 September 2022: On 14 September 2022, the European Commission published a public consultation on its initiative ‘Better protection for passengers and their rights’ which aims to review the EU passenger rights regulatory framework to ensure its resilience to extensive travel disruptions and including options for multimodal tickets.

The European Commission aims to propose an adequate financial protection scheme to protect passengers against the risk of a liquidity crisis or an insolvency regarding the reimbursement of tickets and, if needed, their repatriation.

Feedback is open until 7 December 2022 and a proposal is expected to be adopted during Q1 2023.

More specifically, the Commission is considering policy measures covering the following aspects:

• improved financial protection for air passengers against the risk of a liquidity crisis or an insolvency regarding the reimbursement of tickets and if needed their repatriation;
• reimbursement of air passengers in case of a booking via an intermediary ticket vendor;
• reimbursement in case of cancellation by air passengers in the event of major crisis such as a pandemic or a natural disaster;
• passenger rights for multimodal journeys; and
• improved enforcement of passenger rights in all transport modes.

The first three issues concern air passenger rights only. The fourth topic, ‘passenger rights for multimodal journeys’, concerns the combinations of bus and coach, rail and waterborne transport, and in some cases also air. The fifth topic, better enforcement, concerns all modes of transport.

The initiative will take into account the 2021 special report from the European Court of Auditors on air passenger rights during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Although not all relevant aspects of EU261 Regulation - including compensation for delays and cancellations - are directly covered by the public consultation as reference is still made to the European Commission's 2013 final proposal blocked in the Council, ERA will continue to advocate for a clarification of EU261 Regulation taking into account the specificities of regional air carriers. EU261 in its current form is placing a disproportionate economic burden on regional carriers, which often operate with small aircraft, making several rotations per day, and therefore affect competitiveness of those operators.

As a reminder, in January 2022, ERA responded to the call for evidence on the review of the passenger’s rights regulatory framework urging all parties to adopt a wider vision for transportation generally, and to avoid the unintended consequences that have damaged and continue to threaten regional aviation because of the judicial rewriting of the existing regulation. There is a need for an intermodal approach to passenger rights, rather than one which imposes exclusively on air transport the most draconian consumer rights regulations.

ERA will draft a joint response to the public consultation and circulate it among its members in the upcoming weeks.