A Swissport ground handler at Palma de Mallorca has been on and off strike since the CGT union's action started on 4 August, and by the second week of the month the queues at Terminal B were stretching past the check-in desks and out along the concourse glass. More than twenty airlines run through Swissport's Palma operation, from Ryanair and Jet2 to TUI's charter fleet, and none of them control the strike directly — the walkout is aimed at the ground-handling contractor, not at any single carrier. For a British family who booked a fortnight in Alcúdia back in March, that distinction between "airline" and "ground handler" sounds like legal hair-splitting. It is actually the single fact that decides whether they get compensation or just an apology and a meal voucher. Two passengers can sit three rows apart on the same delayed departure and end up with completely different legal outcomes once the dust settles, purely because one of them kept boarding passes and delay-notification screenshots and the other didn't bother. Nobody explains that at the gate, because nobody at the gate is paid to. The people best placed to walk a stranded family through their actual entitlements are, in practice, other passengers who filed a claim the last time this happened and remember exactly which form worked.
What's happening, and where
The CGT-called action affects check-in, baggage handling and aircraft turnaround, which means its knock-on delays ripple well beyond Mallorca itself — a late turnaround in Palma pushes the same aircraft's next three rotations behind schedule, so passengers flying out of Manchester or Bristol on an inbound aircraft that started its day in Spain can be caught up in a dispute they've never heard of. Palma is the flashpoint, but Swissport ground staff at several other Spanish airports have run coordinated stoppages through August as part of the same pay dispute, and separate strike notices from baggage handlers at Barcelona and Málaga have added to the disruption on the busiest weekends. None of this is behind closed doors: airlines are required to notify passengers of a known cancellation as early as possible, and most of the carriers flying the Balearics route have been sending delay warnings by app notification and email rather than waiting for passengers to find out at the gate.
What EU261 and UK261 actually promise
UK261 — the retained, near-identical British version of the EU's Regulation 261/2004 — applies to any flight departing a UK airport regardless of the airline, and to flights arriving in the UK on an EU or UK carrier. It also covers UK residents flying out of Spain on a UK or EU airline, which is the relevant scenario here. If a flight is cancelled, or delayed by three hours or more at its final destination, passengers become eligible for fixed cash compensation set by distance band: £220 for flights under 1,500 km, £350 for flights between 1,500 and 3,500 km, and £520 for anything longer. A Bristol–Palma route sits just under the middle band, so most families caught in a three-hour-plus delay this August are looking at £350 per passenger, not a token gesture.
That's the headline number, and it's worth saying plainly: airlines routinely lowball this figure or offer travel vouchers instead of cash, and passengers are under no obligation to accept either. Insist on the statutory amount in pounds sterling, paid to the original payment method, and don't let a customer service agent talk you into "goodwill credit" that expires in twelve months. The compensation is separate from — and additional to — any refund or rebooking the airline already owes you for the cancelled flight itself.
The catch: extraordinary circumstances
Here's where the Palma situation gets genuinely more complicated than a straightforward delay claim, and it's the part most compensation-guide articles skip past. Airlines don't owe UK261 or EU261 compensation when a disruption results from "extraordinary circumstances" beyond their control — and a strike by employees of a third-party ground-handling contractor, rather than the airline's own staff, is exactly the kind of case airlines will argue falls into that exemption.
The legal picture isn't as one-sided as either airlines or passenger-rights campaigners like to present it. Case law from the Court of Justice of the EU has drawn a real distinction here: in the 2018 Krüsemann ruling, a wildcat strike by an airline's own cabin crew was found not to count as extraordinary, because staffing disputes are treated as part of normal business risk. A strike by an external ground-handling firm's own employees, over that firm's own pay negotiations, sits on different footing — and several UK and EU tribunals have accepted it as a genuine extraordinary circumstance in comparable cases. That doesn't mean every claim tied to the Swissport action will be refused. It means airlines have a real argument, adjudicators decide case by case, and passengers shouldn't assume the £350 is automatic just because the delay clears three hours. Some carriers will try the exemption on every single Palma-related claim this month regardless of the individual circumstances, hoping a chunk of passengers simply give up rather than escalate. Push back anyway. An adjudicator, not a call-centre script, is the one who actually decides whether a specific flight's disruption counts as extraordinary, and airlines lose a meaningful share of these cases once they're forced to justify the claim in writing rather than repeat it over the phone.
The right to care nobody mentions
Whatever happens with compensation, one obligation survives regardless of fault: the "right to care" applies even when extraordinary circumstances wipe out the cash payment. Airlines still owe passengers meals and refreshments proportionate to the wait, hotel accommodation and transfers if an overnight stay becomes necessary, and a way to make two phone calls, send two emails, or send two faxes (the regulation genuinely still lists faxes) at the airline's expense.
Keep every receipt from the disruption itself. If the airline fails to arrange a hotel or meals directly — which happens often enough during a fast-moving strike, when ground staff themselves are the ones not working — passengers can pay out of pocket and claim it back afterwards, provided the spending is reasonable for the location. A £15 airport meal in Palma is reasonable; a £90 dinner with wine at the hotel restaurant generally isn't, and airlines will push back on inflated claims. Save boarding passes, delay notification screenshots, and hotel invoices in one folder before you leave the airport — reconstructing a paper trail three weeks later from memory is the single most common way a legitimate claim gets rejected on evidence grounds alone.
Filing a claim that actually gets paid
Start with the airline directly, not a claims-management company that takes a cut of anything up to 35% for filling in a form you could complete yourself in fifteen minutes. Most UK and EU carriers now have an online EU261/UK261 claim form buried a couple of clicks below the main "help" page — Ryanair's sits under "EU261 Claim," easyJet's under "Delayed or Cancelled Flights" — and the airline has eight weeks to respond before a complaint can be escalated further.
- Submit the claim within the airline's own time limit, which is typically six years in England and Wales under standard contract-limitation rules, though airlines will often quote shorter internal windows that don't actually bind you legally.
- If the airline rejects the claim or goes silent past eight weeks, escalate to the relevant Alternative Dispute Resolution body — CEDR for airlines that use it (including easyJet and British Airways), AviationADR for others, or the CAA's own passenger complaint service as a last resort for UK-departing flights.
- Small claims court, via Money Claim Online for amounts under £10,000, remains an option if ADR fails — and it's a route worth taking seriously rather than a last-resort threat, because airlines settle a meaningful share of small claims before a hearing date is even set.
Don't accept the first rejection as final, particularly if the airline's stated reason is generic ("operational disruption") rather than a specific account of what happened and why it was genuinely beyond their control. Regulators have been explicit that a vague reference to "extraordinary circumstances" isn't sufficient — the airline must show what actually occurred, and that it took all reasonable measures to avoid or mitigate it.
Rebook or wait it out
For anyone still with a booking through late August, the practical question isn't really about compensation at all — it's whether to rebook now onto a different date or route, or wait and hope the specific flight goes ahead. Airlines flying into Palma have generally kept enough spare capacity to avoid wholesale cancellations, favouring rolling delays over cancelling outright, which is better for the airline's punctuality statistics but worse for anyone with a connecting flight or a pre-paid villa check-in time. If a delay looks likely to run past three hours and there's a genuinely time-sensitive commitment on the other end — a wedding, a cruise departure, a connecting flight with a different airline that won't wait — ask for a same-day reroute via Barcelona or Madrid rather than sitting out the delay on the original booking; airlines are obliged to offer rerouting "under comparable transport conditions at the earliest opportunity," and a same-day alternative counts.
Everyone else is generally better off waiting. A delayed departure that clears the three-hour compensation threshold is, financially, a better outcome for most families than an earlier voluntary rebooking that forfeits the compensation claim entirely — a fact airline call-centre staff are under no obligation to point out, and mostly don't.