FlightPayback is an independent, free tool that tells air passengers whether an airline owes them cash compensation for a delayed, cancelled or overbooked flight under EU Regulation 261/2004 or its UK equivalent, and how much.
The right to compensation is real, it is written into law, and it is worth up to €600 per passenger. Almost nobody claims it. The rules are buried in a twenty-year-old regulation and a stack of court judgments, airlines have no incentive to explain them, and the pages that do explain them are usually written to funnel you into a paid claim service before you find out whether you have a claim at all.
This site answers that one question and then gets out of the way. It takes about fifteen seconds and it costs nothing.
Every answer is calculated from the published text of Regulation (EC) No 261/2004 and the UK's retained version of it. The thresholds, the distance bands and the compensation amounts are taken directly from the regulation.
Two of the trickier rules come from case law rather than the regulation text. The three-hour arrival-delay threshold comes from the Court of Justice ruling in Sturgeon. The treatment of technical faults and airline staff strikes as the airline's own responsibility rather than extraordinary circumstances comes from Wallentin-Hermann and Krüsemann.
Flight distances are great-circle distances calculated from public airport coordinates, which is the method the regulation specifies.
The site carries advertising, and the link offering to hand your claim to a claim company is an affiliate link that earns a commission if you use it. That link is labelled as sponsored wherever it appears.
It does not change the answer you are given. The checker will tell you that you have no claim just as readily as it tells you that you have one, and it will always tell you that claiming yourself is free.
Check a flight