Until now, in order to obtain compensation from an airline, for example in the event of a delay, or to claim miles not credited to the loyalty program, it was necessary to prove that you were indeed on board the plane by providing your boarding pass.

However, it could happen that the passenger is no longer in possession of the said card, lost, misplaced or erased from the mobile. Impossible to be compensatedand, by the way, a very simple way for the airlines to get rid of their responsibility, helped in this by the justice which itself required that this proof be produced.

But that was before the GDPR(General Data Protection Regulation).

AirHelp, a business whose job is to help passengers to get compensation, has indeed used this regulation in a clever way to win its case.

Indeed according to the  GDPR (art.15) any European citizen can ask for access to his personal data held by a business. And you can imagine that the airline asked to prove that the passenger was on the plane knew perfectly well based on the boarding data in its possession, the baggage tickets and all the information collected during the passenger’s journey.

Between the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, Airhelp’s lawyers won 47 cases on this basis. And when the airline refused to provide the data, it was also systematically condemned.

It is important to keep in mind that the system applies as soon as the passenger is European, regardless of the nationality of the airline on which he flies.

Photo : Boarding by TravnikovStudio via Shutterstock.