Horveraflight compensation infrastructure

Context

Regulation (EC) 261/2004 grants fixed compensation — €250, €400 or €600 depending on distance — when a delay, cancellation or denied boarding meets precise conditions. The United Kingdom retained the text with its own amounts in pounds; Switzerland applies it through the air transport agreement with the EU, with its own case-law nuances.

The market is occupied by claims companies that take 30 to 44% of the compensation. Horvera offers the other model: a free, complete result, and a fixed-price Claim Pack for those who want the case organised.

Problem

The passenger does not know air passenger law and should not have to. They know which flight, which day, what happened. The product must turn those facts into a verifiable answer: which right applies, which rule it comes from, why — and stay honest about the fact that the airline or the enforcement body decides in the end.

The difficulty is that three distinct rights coexist — fixed compensation, ticket refund, care and expenses — and confusing them produces wrong claims.

What is difficult

Three jurisdictions that share a text and diverge on amounts, currencies and the reading of delay — Switzerland in particular, where delay compensation depends on how courts read the rules. The engine has to carry those divergences without duplicating the shared rules.

Keeping the trace readable. A full trace is unreadable for a passenger; a summarised trace is unverifiable. The answer is the double presentation: the decisive steps first, the full trace behind.

The product as a system

1. Flight→
2. Eligibility→
3. Claim→
4. Airline→
5. Escalation

Important product decisions

• Fixed price against percentage. Horvera organises the claim; the passenger submits it and keeps everything. Claims companies’ fee models are compared in the open, from their own price pages.
• The result is indicative and says so: it reports what the rules say about the facts given. No outcome is guaranteed — that would be false.
• The date the rules were last reviewed is displayed. A legal engine that does not say when it was checked is not verifiable.
• Five languages from the first version: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian — the audience of a European flight.

Data model and rules engine

The engine is deterministic and versioned. It applies the Regulation, the 2016 interpretative guidelines and the case law of the Court of Justice to the exact route: distance bands, delay thresholds, cancellation notice windows, re-routing margins, denied boarding, extraordinary circumstances, UK and Swiss scope, and the halving rules for long-haul flights.

Every rule has an id and a source. The output is not a boolean but a trace: the decisive steps, then every rule evaluated. The engine is checked against more than a hundred legal scenarios.

Geography is reference data: over three thousand airports, of which a few hundred are within the scope of the three regimes. A flight’s scope is derived from the airports’ position and the airline’s licence, not from a list of countries.

Screens

From input to fulfillment — every stage, its layer, what happens there.

Product architecture

The journey starts with the check: flight date, flight number (optional), departure and arrival airports, the airline that operated the flight — which may differ from the one booked with — and whether there was a connection. The engine determines the scope (EU261, UK261, Switzerland) from the route and the airline’s licence.

The result explicitly separates the three rights, gives the amount, the rule and the sources, and opens with “Why am I seeing this?” — the decisive steps, then the full trace with rule ids.

Two paths follow. The free path is complete: eligibility, amount, a claim letter written from the facts, the airline’s official channel, the enforcement body and dispute scheme for the route. The Claim Pack (€19.90) starts once the claim is sent: saved case, submission-ready PDF, sent-date tracking, follow-up letter, opt-in email reminders, analysis of the airline’s reply, escalation readiness per country.

Domain model

Flight

Route, date, operating airline, connection — the facts the passenger knows.

Airport / Airline

Reference data shared by the engine and the programmatic pages.

Rule

Id, source, version; evaluated into a trace, never reduced to a boolean.

Right

Fixed compensation, ticket refund, care and expenses — three distinct objects.

Claim

Letter, sent date, airline reply, escalation step.

Current status

In production, payments live. Free check; Claim Pack at €19.90; interface in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian; the date the rules were last reviewed is shown on the product.

Business and operating model

The result and the letter are free and complete; the fixed-price Claim Pack starts once the claim is sent. Horvera organises the claim, the passenger submits it and keeps everything — the inverse of claims companies taking 30 to 44% of the amount, whose fee models are compared in the open. The result is indicative and says so: the airline or the enforcement body decides in the end.

What shipped

• Deterministic rules engine: distance bands, delay thresholds, cancellation notice windows, re-routing margins, denied boarding, extraordinary circumstances, UK and Swiss scope — versioned, traced, checked against 100+ legal scenarios
• Claim Pack: saved case, submission-ready PDF, sent date, opt-in follow-up reminders, analysis of the airline’s reply, escalation route per country
• Programmatic search architecture: airline × airport × route × disruption type × jurisdiction pages, plus guides and a free claim-letter generator
• A fixed-price product against a percentage-fee market, with the fee models compared in the open

Acquisition architecture

Horvera is built for search: programmatic pages per airline, airport, route, disruption type and jurisdiction, guides on rights, and a free claim-letter generator. Every page leads to the same checker, which is the product.

The architectural constraint is that these pages must be generated from the same reference data as the engine — airports, airlines, scope — so a page never promises what the engine would refuse.