The Munich District Court has ruled (case number: 191 C 7747/26) that significant changes to flight times on package tours can constitute a travel defect. In the case at hand, a tour operator changed a holidaymaker's flight to Antalya from early morning to late afternoon.
The arrival at the hotel was thus delayed from midday to 20:45 p.m. While the tour operator only applied a pro-rata reduction of five percent of the daily price per hour of delay, the Munich judges considered the agreed flight times to be a value-determining component of the overall travel service.
The court subsequently awarded the plaintiff a reduction equal to the full daily travel price. In their reasoning, the judges stated that early flights allow travelers to actually make use of the first day of their vacation. A shift to the evening hours, on the other hand, almost completely negates the value of this arrival day, which is why simply calculating the delay on an hourly basis does not do justice to the legal nature of the package tour contract.
The civil chamber, however, rejected a further claim for damages due to wasted vacation time. According to established case law of the Federal Court of Justice, such compensation requires that the entire trip be significantly impaired or thwarted. In the case of a two-week package tour, this condition is not met by the loss of a single afternoon. Furthermore, the court clarified that fellow travelers must assert their claims individually or formally assign them; a single person acting as a blanket collector is legally inadmissible.
The ruling is part of a series of consumer-friendly decisions on travel law, but it also underscores the formal limitations on enforcing claims for damages. Tour operators frequently resort to contractual clauses reserving the right to make changes when making operational flight rescheduling, but these clauses are being scrutinized with increasing rigor by the courts. The legal assessment always depends on the specific deviation from the originally confirmed itinerary. The ruling is not yet legally binding.