Air travelers deserve stronger consumer protections—in Europe and the U.S.

Mila Schoun knew what his downgrade was worth, but his airline pretended it didn’t.

Schoun, a senior manufacturing engineer from Pompano Beach, Fla., recently flew from Prague to Miami with his wife. The couple had paid Swiss International Airlines for premium economy seats, but then the airline changed aircraft and downgraded them to the regular cabin for the 10-hour flight across the Atlantic.

Schoun asked the airline to refund the difference between regular economy and premium economy. Swiss refused.

But a 21-year-old European law called EC 261 protected Schoun. And that law said Swiss had to pay him for the downgrade, which it did, after I pointed out the requirement.

EC 261 has your back

If you’ve flown to or from Europe, EC 261 has your back, even if you’ve never heard of it. The regulation, on the books since 2004, requires an airline to pay cash when it cancels your flight, bumps you or strands you for more than three hours. The amount runs from 250 to 600 euros, roughly $290 to $700, depending on distance. 

Get downgraded, like Schoun, and you’re owed a partial refund.

The rule benefits American air travelers too, because it covers any flight leaving an EU airport, including ones operated by U.S. carriers. Millions of Americans cross the Atlantic every year. Most are protected and have no idea.

EC 261 has also improved the overall airline experience. EU passengers today are 70 percent less likely to face delays exceeding three hours and 20 percent less likely to face same-day cancellations than travelers in the United States, according to Tomasz Pawliszyn, president of the Association of Passenger Rights Advocates.

“It’s a framework that successfully prevents an estimated 8,400 hours of flight delays every year,” he adds.

The European consumer protection regulations are the strongest passenger-rights laws on the planet, and they are the rules the airlines hate the most. Any surprise that airlines are trying to eliminate them?

Are they about to undo EC 261?

For months, the smart money in Brussels said regulators were about to eviscerate EC 261.

The airline industry has lobbied for years to weaken the rule. It wanted to raise the delay threshold from three hours to four, or even nine, which would have erased compensation for most travelers who qualify today. One consumer group estimated that up to 70 percent of eligible passengers would lose their claims under the higher threshold.

The European Council, representing member governments, sided with the airlines. The European Parliament fought to keep the three-hour trigger, free cabin bags and the right of parents to sit with their kids without a surcharge. The two sides spent the spring deadlocked, facing a June 15 deadline.

Negotiators appear to have landed on a compromise that keeps the three-hour trigger and leaves the cash amounts largely intact. It even adds rules forcing an airline to tell you when you’re owed money and to pay within 30 days. A final decision is expected June 15.

So passengers dodged the bullet. Time to celebrate?

Not quite.

This consumer protection isn’t what it used to be

Here’s what nobody in Brussels will publicly admit. EC 261 is already weakened. It happened so slowly that nobody noticed.

The compensation amounts (250, 400 and 600 euros) were set in 2004. No one bothered to adjust them for inflation.

I call it silent shrinkage. It’s what happens when a consumer protection stays frozen while everything around it gets pricier. The number on the page looks the same. The protection behind it quietly shrivels.

Just run the numbers. The 250-euro payout would need to be about 390 euros today, and the 600-euro payout about 950 euros, just to hold its 2004 value. In real money, your three-hour delay is worth about a third less than it was when the law passed. 

The airline didn’t have to cut your compensation. Time did it, for free.

The industry spent years and millions lobbying to raise the delay threshold, loudly, in public, where consumer advocates could fight back. Meanwhile the amounts just sat there, slowly losing value.

“Passenger rights should move forward, not backward,” says Kaloyan Todorov, co-founder of SkyRefund, an air passenger rights company. “Travelers in 2026 should be better protected than they were in 2004.”

Consider what the law actually delivered for Schoun. After four months of back-and-forth, his downgrade compensation came to about 70 euros a person. That’s what a transatlantic premium-economy downgrade is worth in 2026 under the planet’s best passenger-rights law. In 2004 it would have stung the airline. Now it’s a rounding error.

Come on Brussels, you can do better

So here’s my proposal for Brussels, now that everyone’s congratulating themselves for not making things worse.

Don’t stop at “not worse.” Make it better.

Raise the amounts to match inflation, then index them so this never happens again. Tie the payouts to a price level the way pensions and minimum wages already are, so a delay in 2046 is worth what a delay is worth today. 

And while you’re at it, the Untied States should take notes, because we already wrote the outline and then threw it away. 

In December 2024, the U.S. Department of Transportation proposed its own version of EC 261. An airline that delayed your domestic flight three hours or more, through its own fault, would have owed you cash, starting around $200 and climbing to $775 for the worst delays, plus meals and a hotel if it stranded you overnight. It was the closest America has ever come to a real passenger protection law.

That lasted about a year. This past fall, the DOT withdrew the proposal, calling it an unnecessary regulatory burden and saying airlines should compete on the compensation they offer rather than be required to offer any. 

Schoun got his money because a two-decade-old law still had just enough teeth. The question for Brussels, and for Washington, is whether we keep those teeth sharp or let them wear down to nothing.