Your flight is delayed — what to do now

If your flight has just been delayed, the first useful thing is not a booking of any kind. It is the desk with your airline’s name on it.

Airlines operating out of Phuket are obliged to look after passengers during long delays — meals while you wait, and a hotel if the delay turns into an overnight stay. That obligation exists whether or not anybody mentions it, and it is why the lounge pass and the airport hotel that look tempting right now may be things you do not have to pay for at all. Ask first. This page is about what to ask for.

While you are waiting

Go to your airline’s desk, not to airport information. Vouchers, rebooking and hotel arrangements come from the carrier. Airport staff can point you at the desk and little else.

Ask specifically for meal vouchers, and for the delay in writing. Written confirmation of the delay and its length is the document any later claim rests on, and it is far easier to get while standing there than by email in three weeks.

Keep the boarding pass and the booking reference. Photograph both. People throw away exactly the piece of paper a claim needs.

Watch the board rather than the app. Status changes reach departures and the airline’s own screens first, and a delay being extended in increments is a different situation from one long delay announced once.

Charge everything while you can. If the phone dies, so do the booking reference, the boarding pass and your way of reaching anybody.

This is not a favour. Scheduled flights leaving a Thai airport fall under a passenger-protection regulation issued by the Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand, in force since May 2025, and it binds every carrier using the airport rather than only the Thai ones. Meals past one threshold of waiting, fuller care past a longer one. If a desk tells you that nothing is provided, asking about that regulation by name tends to change the conversation.

If you are staying the night

Ask the airline before you book anything. Where an overnight stay is unavoidable because of the disruption, the accommodation and the transport to it are the carrier’s to arrange. Rooms near the airport fill quickly when a flight goes down, so this is the first question rather than the third.

If nobody is at the desk, book a room yourself and keep every receipt. A modest room booked promptly and claimed afterwards is a much better position than a night in the terminal and an argument later. Photograph the departure board showing your flight as well — it dates the disruption.

Check the check-out time against your rebooked flight. A room taken at three in the morning still ends at the usual hour, which is rarely what a rebooked passenger needs.

If you are arranging it yourself, the page on finding a room for the night covers what can be had at short notice on this side of the island.

Do not send your luggage anywhere. Bags already checked in normally stay with the airline; bags with you are your problem, and the left luggage counters keep their own hours rather than running through the night.

Whether money is owed as well

Care and cash are two different things. Care — food, a bed — follows from the delay happening at all. Cash compensation depends on why it happened, and that distinction is where most of the disappointment on this subject comes from.

Causes that pay nothing. Weather, including the storms that disrupt this airport in the wet season. Air traffic control decisions. Security incidents, strikes outside the airline, an aircraft grounded by an authority. These count as extraordinary circumstances, and no scheme pays out on them however long the wait was.

Causes that may pay. A technical fault, crew scheduling, an aircraft that arrived late on the airline’s own rotation, denied boarding after overbooking.

Two regimes can apply here, sometimes at once.

The Thai regulation covers scheduled departures from Phuket for everybody, and provides a fixed payment on long delays alongside the care described above.

EC 261 covers flights operated by European carriers, and because those airlines hold European licences it reaches them in both directions — not only the leg leaving Europe. On the Phuket network that means the long-haul operators flying in from Germany, Italy, the Nordics and Switzerland. Switzerland is neither in the EU nor in the EEA, but the regulation reaches Swiss-licensed carriers through the air transport agreement between Bern and Brussels, and the Swiss federal aviation office supervises it.

Claiming. Go to the airline first: it costs nothing, and a straightforward claim is often paid without a fight. Claim companies are useful when an airline stops replying, but they keep a share of whatever they recover — that is the trade, and it is better understood before signing than after. Nothing here is a promise that a payment is due. The honest version is that it is worth checking, and that the cause decides it.

Travel insurance sometimes covers what the airline does not, and whether yours does is a question about the policy rather than about the flight — the travel insurance page covers what to look for in one.

If the flight is cancelled outright

The choice between a new flight and a refund is yours. An airline may offer whichever suits it; you are not obliged to accept that one. Taking the refund means giving up the rerouting, so work out which you actually need before answering.

Care continues either way. Meals and, where the night cannot be avoided, accommodation apply to a cancellation exactly as they apply to a delay.

Rebooking on another airline is sometimes possible and is worth asking about explicitly, particularly when your own carrier’s next departure is a day away.

Check what else the cancellation breaks. A transfer booked for tonight, the first night of a hotel, a boat to the islands in the morning — most of those can be moved for nothing if you tell the operator today and cost the full price if you tell them tomorrow. If the onward leg was a ferry, the Phi Phi page explains why the last boat of the day decides the rest of it.