Flight Cancellation Refund: Claim From Airline or Portal

One of my clients recently had a case which I am explaining below and if you are stuck in such similar situation, here is what to do.

Note: Due to attorney-client privilege, I cannot disclose complete case details or identify the actual parties involved. However, I am sharing the essential facts and legal approach so that if you find yourself in a similar situation, you can understand the available solutions and legal remedies.

TL;DR: A flight cancellation refund cannot be refused on a reason that contradicts the company

What I can do is set out how the law treats that refusal, and what a passenger in the same position should do in the first two weeks rather than the second year.

Key facts

• A confirmed air ticket was booked and paid for.
• The airline then cancelled the flight.
• The refund was refused, or held up, on a ground that sits awkwardly with the airline's own stated terms.
• Everything else — the carrier, the route, the amount, the correspondence — falls inside privilege and is not reproduced here.

We have one side of this. Airlines usually have a version too, and occasionally that version changes the picture. Where the file is thin, I say so below instead of pretending otherwise.

What the DGCA rules require once a flight is cancelled

Air travel in India is governed by the Civil Aviation Requirements (CARs) issued by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, read with the airline's own Conditions of Carriage, which are the contract between you and the carrier. The CAR on cancellation of flights deals with what a passenger must be offered when the airline itself cancels.

Refund or rerouting — your choice, not the airline's

When the carrier cancels, the passenger is entitled to elect between a full refund of the fare and an alternate flight or rerouting to the destination. That choice belongs to the passenger. An airline cannot substitute a credit shell, a voucher or a date change for a refund you did not ask for. This is the single most litigated point in the whole area, and it is also the easiest to prove: the CARs, the ticket and the cancellation message usually settle it.

Compensation is a separate question from the refund

Refund and compensation are not the same thing, and mixing them up weakens a complaint. A compensation obligation generally arises where the airline cancels close to departure, does not give the passenger the notice the CAR requires, and does not arrange an acceptable alternative. Where compensation applies, the CAR bands the amount by reference to the scheduled block time of the flight. It is paid on top of, not instead of, the refund.

The CAR text is revised from time to time, so check the version in force on the date of the cancellation, not the date you booked. The bands I set out below are the ones in the CAR as it has stood in recent years; treat them as something to verify against the current text rather than as fixed for all time.

How much notice the airline gave you changes the obligation

The CAR works off a timeline measured backwards from departure.

• Two weeks or more before departure: the airline must offer you an alternative flight or a full refund.
• Between two weeks and twenty-four hours before departure: again, an alternative flight or a full refund.
• Less than twenty-four hours before departure, or where you miss a connection booked on a single ticket: the compensation band is triggered, over and above the refund.

Compensation is capped by reference to the one-way basic fare plus fuel charge, and further capped at three figures — roughly five thousand, seven thousand five hundred, and ten thousand rupees — depending on the scheduled block time of the flight. Longer flight, higher ceiling. The first step in any such file is to work out which of these three buckets your cancellation falls into, because the answer determines whether you are arguing about a refund alone or a refund plus compensation.

Where the refusal contradicts the airline's own terms

This is the part that usually decides the matter, and it is a documentary argument, which is why it is worth running even on a modest amount.

The airline sells you a ticket on its Conditions of Carriage. Those conditions ordinarily state that where the carrier cancels the flight, the passenger gets a refund, and that refunds are processed to the original mode of payment within a stated number of working days. The statutory taxes and fees are refundable in any case. So when a carrier refuses a refund by pointing to an internal policy, or to a fare rule that it never showed you, or to a position it has itself contradicted in earlier correspondence, the refusal tends to collapse under its own paperwork.

Two caveats, both real. First, we only have the passenger's account of what was said and when. An airline can usually produce a screen showing a fare condition or a waiver it claims was accepted. Second, the CAR is issued as a binding direction to carriers and does not carve out non-refundable fare buckets for cancellations the airline itself caused — that is my reading, and it is the position I would argue, but airlines do contest it and a commission will look at the fare rule in the specific booking. Do not assume the point is free.

Can an airline refuse a flight cancellation refund?

Not when the cancellation is the airline's own and you have asked for your money back. What the carrier cannot do is decide on your behalf that you would rather have a credit shell, a voucher, or a date change, and then treat that as a refund. The election is yours under the CAR. A restriction on the refund, or a refusal dressed up as a policy, is a deficiency in service and can be taken to a consumer commission or to the DGCA's grievance machinery.

There are genuine exceptions, and it is worth knowing them before you write an angry mail. Where the cancellation is attributable to extraordinary circumstances outside the airline's control — weather, air traffic control restrictions, security alerts — the refund obligation generally survives but the compensation obligation may not. Where the flight was not cancelled at all but rescheduled, and you accepted the new schedule, the picture changes again. And where the passenger simply did not turn up, that is not a cancellation by the airline at all.

What to do in the first two weeks, not the second year

Speed matters here less because of any limitation deadline and more because evidence degrades and the airline's call centre story hardens. The sequence I suggest:

• Write to the airline in writing, not through app chat. Quote the PNR, state the date and time you were informed of the cancellation, ask for a full refund to the original payment method within a specified period, and refer to the CAR. Ask for the reply in writing.
• Escalate to AirSewa, the Ministry of Civil Aviation's grievance portal, if there is no substantive reply in about a week. Complaints routed there are tracked and the carrier is expected to respond.
• If you paid by card or UPI, ask your bank to raise a chargeback. Be aware that chargeback rules are network-specific and time-bound, the airline will contest it, and a chargeback can complicate a later consumer complaint. It is a lever, not a clean solution.
• Keep the paper. Ticket and payment receipt, the cancellation email or SMS with its timestamp, the boarding pass if one was issued, every email exchanged, and screenshots of the booking page and the fare rules as they appeared when you booked.
• If it goes further, a complaint under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 goes to the District Commission for claims up to fifty lakh rupees, and can be filed online through the e-Daakhil portal. National Consumer Helpline 1915 is a faster route for pre-litigation mediation and costs you nothing.

On time and cost: a consumer complaint carries a modest filing fee banded by the value of the claim, and a contested matter in a District Commission can run anywhere from several months to a couple of years, longer if the airline appeals. Mediation through the Helpline often resolves these in weeks. Where the amount is small, mediation is usually the sensible first stop.

How long you have

Two clocks can matter, and they are not the same clock.

• Consumer complaint: within two years of the cause of action, which is generally the date of refusal or the date the refund fell due.
• International carriage: where the ticket involves international carriage, the Carriage by Air Act, 1972 gives effect to the Montreal Convention regime, and actions for damages are subject to a two-year limitation running from the date of arrival, or from the date the aircraft ought to have arrived. A pure refund claim is contractual, but a consequential loss claim may attract this route. If your ticket crossed a border, get this checked rather than assuming the consumer period applies.
• DGCA or AirSewa: no formal limitation, but a complaint filed a year late tends to get a routine reply.

Where there may be nothing to argue

I would rather say this than take a fee on a file with no legs. If the airline cancelled for weather or air traffic reasons, refunded the full fare including taxes within the stated window, and offered a reroute you declined, there is likely nothing left to claim on compensation. If you accepted a voucher and used part of it, your position is weaker, because acceptance may be treated as settlement. If the ticket was bought by an employer or a travel agent, the refund in practice routes through the paying entity, and you may not be the right claimant. And if the airline has a signed record of a fare rule you agreed to, the documentary argument runs the other way.

Frequently Asked Questions

What to send us, and where

If the airline has refused in writing, or gone quiet for more than a month, the file can usually be assessed from four documents: the ticket or PNR confirmation, the cancellation email or SMS with its date and time, the airline's refusal or the record of no reply, and the payment receipt showing who paid. Send those with a two-line note on what you want — refund, compensation, or both — through /contact-us or /book. Refund and deficiency claims are consumer matters; where the file turns on fraud or forged booking records, or where the airline's conduct needs to be met with a criminal complaint, that falls within what this chamber handles, as does cyber crime and economic offences. Where the matter is a family or matrimonial dispute, Adv. Jyoti Rao handles those.

One practical note before you write: if the amount involved is a few thousand rupees, say so in your mail. On a file like that, mediation through the National Consumer Helpline is often the honest answer, and I will tell you so instead of filing a complaint you do not need.

This article is general information about Indian law and procedure. It is not legal advice on your own situation, which depends on facts this article does not have.

Advocate Sudhir Rao, Supreme Court of India