LOT Polish Airlines owes €250, €400 or €600 when you land three or more hours late at your final destination, when it cancels with under 14 days’ notice, or when it denies you boarding. It holds a Polish operating licence, so EU261 covers the flights it operates out of Europe and into Europe alike, including the long-haul programme from Warsaw.
Article 7 names cancellation and denied boarding. The same fixed sum after a three-hour arrival delay comes from Sturgeon (C-402/07 and C-432/07, 2009), upheld in Nelson (C-581/10 and C-629/10, 2012). The bands are in the amounts table.
Which regime applies to your LOT flight
| Your flight | Regime |
|---|---|
| Departs an airport in the EU or EEA, or arrives in the EU from a third country on LOT | EU261 — euro amounts, enforcement body of the country where it happened |
| Departs a UK airport | UK261 — £220, £350 or £520, and the CAA route |
Warsaw–London is €250, and Warsaw–Chicago is €600
Great-circle distance to your final destination sets the amount. Warsaw’s position gives LOT a long list of routes near the top band and one famous near miss at the bottom. From the airport coordinates this site ships:
| Route | Great-circle | Band |
|---|---|---|
| Warsaw – Kraków | 246 km | €250 |
| Warsaw – Vilnius | 396 km | €250 |
| Warsaw – Frankfurt | 897 km | €250 |
| Warsaw – London Heathrow | 1,469 km | €250 |
| Warsaw – Tel Aviv | 2,508 km | €400 |
| Warsaw – Lisbon | 2,749 km | €400 |
| Warsaw – New York JFK | 6,848 km | €600 |
| Warsaw – Toronto | 6,935 km | €600 |
| Warsaw – Chicago | 7,519 km | €600 |
| Warsaw – Seoul Incheon | 7,726 km | €600 |
| Warsaw – Tokyo Narita | 8,613 km | €600 |
London falls 31 km short of the 1,500 km threshold, so a six-hour delay to Heathrow is €250 from Warsaw and £220 the other way. The transatlantic and Asian routes are all comfortably past 3,500 km with one end outside the Union, which puts the entire long-haul network in the €600 band. The measuring rule is in how flight distance is measured.
Two judgments with LOT’s name on them
Both are recent, both are on EUR-Lex, and both change what you do rather than only what you know.
Polskie Linie Lotnicze ‘LOT’ SA v Budapest Főváros Kormányhivatala (C-597/20, 29 September 2022). The Court held that Article 16 lets a Member State authorise its national enforcement body to compel an air carrier to pay Article 7 compensation on an individual passenger’s complaint, provided the passenger and the carrier can still go to court. That is the answer to any regulator that tells you it only supervises: whether it can order payment depends on the powers its own state gave it, not on the Regulation forbidding it.
JW and Others v LOT Polish Airlines (C-20/21, 3 February 2022). Passengers on a single booking, Warsaw to Frankfurt to Malé, sued in Frankfurt over a delay on the first leg. The Court held that where the claim arises exclusively from a delay on the first leg and is brought against the carrier that operated it, the arrival airport of that first leg is not a “place of performance” giving jurisdiction. The suit belonged where the first leg departed.
Suing in the wrong country costs you months, not the claim. C-20/21 says the intermediate airport does not give you a court. If your only complaint is the delay of the leg into the hub, look to where that leg took off or where the whole journey ends — and check the limitation period for that country before you file, because there is no EU-wide period: see claim time limits by country.
Where a LOT claim goes after a refusal
We could not open LOT’s own passenger-rights page: lot.com returned HTTP 404 on one candidate path and an access-blocked page on the other, on 6 September 2026. We do not publish a claim URL we have not opened. Use LOT’s own help centre, keep the reference, and send the same text by email.
Poland’s body is the Rzecznik Praw Pasażerów — the Passengers’ Rights Ombudsman at the President of the Civil Aviation Office (ULC). Its site returned HTTP 403 to every automated request we made on 6 September 2026, so we cannot quote its conditions or publish a link we could not open; the current contact details are in the European Commission’s list of national enforcement bodies, updated 27 August 2026, and in where to complain. The Commission’s own instruction is to contact the body in the country where the incident took place — for a LOT flight out of Frankfurt or Vilnius, that is Germany or Lithuania, not Poland. For a UK departure, neither CAA-approved scheme listed LOT on 6 September 2026, which leaves CAA PACT, and the CAA says PACT cannot make a binding decision on an airline.
My connection through Warsaw made me late. What can I claim?
On one booking with at least one end in the EU, the delay is measured at your final destination and the band over the whole journey, so a delayed feeder into Warsaw can carry a €600 claim. Check the “operated by” line first: Article 2(b) puts the obligation on the airline that flew the leg, and see which airline actually owes you.
LOT offered a voucher. Do I have to take it?
No. Article 7(3) pays compensation in cash, by electronic bank transfer, bank order or cheque, and allows a travel voucher only with your signed agreement. Decline it in writing, say that you want payment by bank transfer, and give the account details once.
Rules in force today
This is the law that applies to a flight you take today. A revision of Regulation 261/2004 was adopted in July 2026 — the Parliament approved the conciliation text on 7 July 2026 and the Council gave final approval on 13 July 2026 — and it is not yet in force: it applies 12 months after it enters into force following publication in the Official Journal, and the final text sets the details. See what the 2026 EU261 reform changes.