Gulf crisis reveals air passengers’ rights rules are unfit for purpose

Albert Park in Melbourne is normally a tranquil location, except for one weekend a year: this coming Saturday and Sunday, ear defenders are recommended as the F1 Grand Prix reverberates around the southernmost big city in the world.

This year, the Formula One Qatar Airways Australian Grand Prix 2026 – as it is officially known – will be unusual. The teams and the fans will not be able to reach the festival of motorsport in Melbourne on the flights of the main sponsor.

Qatar Airways has planes parked up at airports around the world. “Aircraft on ground” (AOGs) in Australia include an A380 parked up next to a trio of Emirates SuperJumbos at Sydney, and a Boeing 787 in the capital, Canberra. While the chaos in the Gulf is unfolding, these planes are paralysed – along with the plans, hopes and dreams of the passengers who were expecting to fly on them.

Since the airspace of Qatar and much of the rest of the region closed down at the weekend, I have tried to advise as many passengers as possible about their rights.

For the thousands who are booked each day to fly from UK airports to the Qatari capital, Doha, and connect straight to a destination in Asia, Australasia or Africa, the advice is simple. The airline is obliged to find an alternative way to get you to your destination as close to the original timings as possible.

As is inevitable when a substantial chunk of the world’s aviation capacity is suddenly removed, fares have soared while seats have become scarce. The non-stop London Heathrow to Perth this week has been fully booked, with McLaren and Red Bull teams switching to the Qantas flight. But this is the cancelling airline’s problem, not the passenger’s.

A number of readers have contacted me to say that Qatar Airways has declined to switch them to other carriers from the UK to destinations beyond Doha; I have contacted the carrier to ask for an explanation. Meanwhile, travellers can book on an alternative airline and send the Qatari carrier the bill. Visitors to the UK who are waiting to fly home via the Gulf are being accommodated in hotels, with meals provided by the airline.

Yet for British passengers who had already flown to the eastern and southern hemisphere, and have been hoping to fly back this week, the picture is very different. Non-European airlines have no obligation to provide customer care for flights that originate outside the EU and UK.

This week, I have met many British travellers in Australia whose last few days of the trip have been consumed by trying to rearrange their travel plans. One couple – farmers from Leicestershire – spent almost £10,000 on tickets from Sydney via San Francisco to London.

Passengers have also been racking up hotel bills at an alarming rate. So far – except for travellers in the scary position of staying in hotels in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, where the UAE government is picking up the bill – there is little indication that the airlines are intending to reimburse passengers. They may yet do so, and I urge anyone stranded to keep meticulous receipts in the hope that the airline will agree to meet out-of-pocket expenses.

Standard travel insurance policies are unlikely to help. The Gulf airspace shutdown has revealed the, er, gulf between where air passengers’ rights rules end and travel cover begins.

Surely if holidaymakers have inadvertently been caught up in severe disruption of this nature, somebody should pick up the bill? That is the essence of European air passengers’ rights rules, which have just celebrated their 21st birthday. But one of the many flaws in the “261” legislation is the inherent lopsidedness.

The entitlements apply to all flights leaving the UK and EU, but for those coming back from outside Europe, the requirements for care (and sometimes compensation) apply only to British and European airlines. Lots of passengers, understandably, have trouble getting their heads around this. Same plane, same ticket, same distance, but if your ticket shows you are flying home rather than away, you lose the gold-plated consumer protection in the event of disruption.

It is time to remove this loophole. I am not suggesting that it should apply to a rather wayward trip like my current adventure, involving a succession of individual bookings on Turkish, Chinese, Australian, Indonesian and Malaysian carriers. If things fall apart, it’s on me.

But British passengers who book a simple return ticket from the UK on Qatar Airways, or any other foreign airline, deserve the same protection in either direction. As they say in Melbourne this weekend: let’s make some noise.

Read more: I was stranded in the UAE – the rescue mission was a shambles