The 2014 Christmas holidays are worth 1,45 million euros. In fact, this is the amount of potential refunds for cancelled, delayed or overbooked flights to which Italian sparrows are entitled. This was calculated by AirHelp, a start-up that offers an online service to get your money back when flights are delayed, canceled or overbooked. Already because if the legislation provides for the possibility of being reimbursed, the legal process and bureaucratic quibbles are often insurmountable obstacles that can lead the passenger to give up on his or her purpose. And the percentage of those who ask for refunds often does not reach 2%.
AirHelp, on the other hand, thinks of everything: it has automated the legal process, it has a system for proactively monitoring the reimbursement process and the bureaucratic and legal costs are borne by the company which is remunerated with a 25 percent percentage of the compensation obtained. Just go to the website www.airhelp.it and check if your flight is one of those eligible for a refund. Not only. Flight verification can be done going back up to three years. “If you've been on a delayed, canceled or denied boarding flight in the past three years, you may be entitled to up to €600 from the airline,” reads the site's home page.
A service that could be useful for Italian users. Alitalia does not shine for efficiency when it comes to complaints, according to the AirHelp score, an index created by the same start-up that reveals how airlines will treat you in the event of delays, cancellations or overbookings. “He wastes too much time acknowledging a complaint – reads the website (October 2015) – and even worse he doesn't pay the refunds on time. The fact that it is just above the average for punctual flights prevents Alitalia from falling among the worst, but this does not detract from its low score in the AirHelp score”.
Carriers are judged on the basis of five parameters (complaint handling, payment time, unfairly rejected complaints, on-time arrival performance, product and service offered by the airline). The best companies, says the AirHelp Score, are AirBaltic, Australian Airlines and Lufthansa. The worst are Sata International and Tap Portugal. AirHelp is present in 17 countries and was born from an entrepreneurial idea of an international team of startuppers who met in Thailand to participate in the Projectgetaway entrepreneurial program: 20 entrepreneurs meet in a villa for a month with the aim of creating new business. But one of them, Henrik Zillmer, ran into a flight delayed for more than three hours.
