Travel Question of the Day: Simon Calder on your rights when an airline changes your flight time

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Heraklion in Crete: an enticing lunchtime arrival was ruined (Shutterstock)

Q Last September I booked flights/accommodation for myself and partner to Crete, flying out of Manchester to Heraklion on Thomas Cook Airlines. I was informed that our flight times would be 7.50am departure from Manchester, returning on a 3.15pm departure from Heraklion. These suited us well. On 4 March I received another email informing me that the outward journey departure time had changed to 3.15pm and the return departure time to 10.45pm, which will result in arriving back in Manchester in the early hours of the following day. The Thomas Cook agent told me the changes were down to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). They said Thomas Cook Airlines had been allocated these times and not those which they had originally requested. Does this seem plausible? And would we be entitled to any compensation?

Duncan Asquith

A What was an enticing lunchtime arrival in Crete and civilised return to Manchester has become a late-evening arrival on the island and unsociable return home. All holiday airlines that I know are prone to switching times – typically by an hour or less, but in your case by more than seven hours. They do this for a couple of reasons. When summer 2016 holidays are put on sale, there is a fair amount of uncertainty about everything from the precise deployment of the fleet of aircraft to the demand for individual flights and holidays. Therefore, timings as initially announced tend to be speculative.

By spring, everything is clearer and final timings can be assigned. I speculate Thomas Cook Airlines has come up with radically new times as part of its wholesale rescheduling of flights, as a result of severe cutbacks to services to Turkey. Many flights have been switched to Spanish and Portuguese airports.

Here's a possible scenario. The airline initially planned to fly your trip from Manchester to Heraklion in the morning, and then use the same plane to go from Manchester to Bodrum in Turkey in the afternoon. If Thomas Cook Airlines wants to re-route the Turkish flight to Tenerife, it may be that the Spanish airport said it was full that evening. The airline may have had to swap the flights in order to take advantage of an available lunchtime slot in Tenerife.

But while there may well have been slot issues associated with these flights, to blame the CAA is absurd: it is concerned with the safe regulation of aviation and the fair treatment of passengers, not with the day-to-day allocation of slots.

A spokesperson for Thomas Cook Airlines told me: “This is just a standard slot change, with an incorrect assumption from the agent handling the call that it was CAA-related. It’s not.”

In terms of compensation: I’m afraid that the conditions you agreed to when you booked allow the airline to shift timings; only changes of 12 hours or more are regarded as “significant”. All you can do is vote with your feet, or your credit card, next time.

Every day, our travel correspondent Simon Calder tackles a reader’s question. Just email yours to s@hols.tv or tweet @simoncalder